12 ms·

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)

266 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

ulkesh 5y ago
I currently work for the person who helped start US Videotel and I still haven't scratched much of the surface about all of it with him. Everything about Minitel and US Videotel reminds me of what was depicted in seasons 2 and 3 of Halt and Catch Fire. I always wondered if Minitel was their inspiration for the Mutiny software.
- wmf 5y ago
  To me Mutiny looks like Lucasfilm Habitat down to the UI and C64 platform. https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html
  - ulkesh 5y ago
    Ah, didn't know about that. The concepts seem to be very similar, though. In US Videotel at least, there was a community function in addition to the various other functions the system provided (stocks, weather, etc). Thanks for the info!
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    This reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, arguably the greatest contribution Microsoft made to computer science: https://chrisgliddon.com/a-trip-down-memory-lane-microsoft-comic-chat-6f23b8a64295 https://chrisgliddon.com/a-trip-down-memory-lane-microsoft-c...
cf100clunk 5y ago
See also Telidon, a Canadian technology that had similar goals to Minitel but saw only limited implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telidon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telidon
athenot 5y ago
It ran on V.23, which was 1200 bits/s down and 75 bits/s up, but could be reversed in case one wanted to upload / type stuff. Once modems were widespread, it was a lot better to use Minitel emulators on a computer, as one could record and replay sessions after disconnection—a key aspect since most Minitel numbers were billed at premium rates, to allow services to be monetized. </memories>
markharper 5y ago
Notably a core plot device in the French Home Alone style film Deadly Games (aka Dial Code Santa). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Games_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Games_(film)
- dmix 5y ago
  The trailer is like a Bizarro world Home Alone https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/ Now I’m curious if the Home Alone screenwriter watched it.
  - elvis70 5y ago
    John Hughes watched it at the festival of Cannes in 1989, after this article (in French): https://www.bfmtv.com/people/3615-code-pere-noel-le-film-francais-culte-qui-a-inspire-maman-j-ai-rate-l-avion_AN-202012240039.html https://www.bfmtv.com/people/3615-code-pere-noel-le-film-fra...
    - dmix 5y ago
      This has always been a great business idea. Watch good foreign films and spin them into Americanized versions then pitch them to Hollywood. Also I find it amusing that Home Alone in France is titled "Mom, I missed the plane"
      - elvis70 5y ago
        At least, René Manzor was eventually hired by Amblin.
      - uoaei 5y ago
        Intellectual property theft is a great business idea, you're right! Quite the condemnation of both social constructs :)
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > Watch good foreign films and spin them into Americanized versions That's the entire history of Hollywood and american music industry. Those businesses who wouldn't like us to share made their fortunes on entirely borrowed things from other cultures. Many of the great revered american singers copied note-for-note traditional african songs, for example.
louissan 5y ago
I remember being nearly murdered by my parents after they received the phone bill via the (physical, paper-based in those days :-) ) mail. The minitel promptly was locked out of reach of the family's children .... still, good days. They even had games! 36.15 ...
- jpoesen 5y ago
  A little too much of 3615 ZAZA perhaps?
  - louissan 5y ago
    hah I wish I could have. But... in hindsight ... no. Teenage wet fantasies and all that :-)
- thamer 5y ago
  For context for "36.15": you would access Minitel services by typing a numeric code followed by a short textual name, the most common code being 3615. Advertisements for Minitel services would say something like "Dial 3615 HOTSTUFF to meet a passionate lover". A lot of these services were adult chat, games, or extremely low-res porn, and it was easy to rack up a massive phone bill by connecting to them (you'd have to remember to disconnect, too!). Another very common use cases was phone book lookups. Think of it as a physical terminal for a ncurses-style terminal app using a remote client, with the display updating line by line with a scanning cursor as you received data. There's an example of what that looked like in this short documentary about Minitel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s – every single page loaded line by line that way.
  - glandium 5y ago
    More precisely, the minitel would call 36 15, which would open a page on which you type the short textual name and press enter, which would then connect you to the service you want. And the terminal would tell you the cost per minute of the service.
- 5y ago
jacquesm 5y ago
If anything it was so far ahead of the early web that it hindered adoption of the WWW in France. It was incredibly good and rich, many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers. It took at least until 1996 before the web could compete and by that time France reluctantly started to let go of their beloved tiny terminals. It took until 2012 (!!) before it was finally decommissioned, but by then there really wasn't much left of it to be turned off.
- jbkiv 5y ago
  I was inspired by the Minitel to start Esurance in 1997. The Minitel of course had porn (more Craigslist type "offerings" from real people) but also reservations, travel, and...INSURANCE! You are totally correct, it was so efficient that it delayed the adoption of the worldwide web. Of course France wanted something in FRENCH (!). As I was raising money in Europe for Esurance, the French executives would look down on me and say "we have the Minitel, we want nothing to do with your Internet" :-)
- cm2187 5y ago
  And it solved a problem I’d argue the internet hasn’t solved yet: how to charge users securely, easily and for small amounts. The way it did that is through your phone bill, since the minitel was using your phone line. No credit card number to enter (and be hacked), no credentials to enter. Of course it also meant kids had access to it…
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Web Monetization, Coil.com, Interledger are trying to solve that same problem [1] but honestly It's doubtful it will work. 1 - I've written about this here https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetization-if-you-want-less-ads-on-the-web/ https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati... and it was widely, if mostly negatively, discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857
    - 5y ago
miki123211 5y ago
Let's not forget that Minitel couldn't be as great as it was if not for its complete and utter centralization. Sometimes having twenty slightly different services that are blocked from interoperating for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all.
- LeanderK 5y ago
  > for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all. For some this is not some abstract notion but a real worry. I am glad the internet started decentralised.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Minitel was probably subject to substantial government regulation, unlike the "tech" companies that dominate the web and overinfluence the internet. Minitel was probably funded at least in part through taxation. Certainly, Minitel was not a secretive Silicon Valley-styled company with dual class shares or other entrenching governance structures, that allow for concentration of voting power in the hands of company insiders, through disproportionate allocation of voting rights among shareholders. It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do. Regardless of the public opinion toward telecom, it has historically been subject to far more regulation than so-called "tech" companies operating websites. Sadly, some of today's telecom companies try to emulate or piggyback on the privacy violating behaviour of "Big Tech". Centralisation/decentralisation is an interesting debate, but if the issue is privacy then, IMO, one also needs to consider the question of regulation/deregulation. Perhaps Minitel was an example of a regulated, government-supported public computer networking service that worked very well. Silicon Valley and its charlatan ideology is a privacy disaster. It is probably a threat to the survival of democratic societies as we know them.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do. Oh yes we do. France Telecom back in the day wasn't all that bad, but the prices were crazy: copper is expensive but not so much that you should pay every month dozens of francs (before the euro, don't remember the exact number) without even paying for usage. But at least from what i remember tech support and intervention times were decent before the Internet, then came Wanadoo and then the privatization of France Télécom into Orange and now we have shitty service like everyone else.
bertil 5y ago
I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL, the technology that made computer networks easy to expand to every house, and the general idea that the Internet could be a domestic technology. Until the late 80s, the Internet was a military and gradually academic tool, but even until the mid-90s, having an internet connection at home was quaint outside of France where accessing your official records, buying certain things online was a convenient reality. TCP/IP and Tier 1 networks were only one half of the story, and the far smaller, easier half: connecting every country is a matter of a few big projects; connecting everyone is something, that to this day, many still struggle with. There’s an occasional mention of Cepremades as an inspiration for the Internet Protocol, some technicality about Alohanet, but never a history of why that should be in everyone’s living room, except a mysterious prescient and unhelpful AOL, their omnipresent CD, and nothing about the government-sponsored, centralised project to make cheap modulator-demodulator use long copper wires — something that proved both incredibly difficult and relevant.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  Well, you're right that the Minitel was more easily obtainable, but there WERE CompuServe, Prodigy, and other private services in the US before the Internet took off. Those had some pretty large subscriber bases; nothing like now, of course.
- JPLeRouzic 5y ago
  > I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL Do you mean for digital technologies or for specifically DSL? As I remember up to 1996 there was no commercial DSL in France, but there were excellent ISDN coverage (with rate up to 128kbits/sec with two channels). However it was quite expensive and when DSL was commercialized in France, it was cheaper at the basic rate of 512Kbits/sec. ISDN commercialization started around 1988 in France. In 1996 the Network part of FT started to think how to open the network to higher bandwidth, and it was not so easy because the internal backbone was built on ATM as it was used by Minitel users. Some years later (2002?) with declining Minitel revenues, FT decided to give the priority to DSL, with an adequate IP backbone. (Source: It's only from my memories, I was involved in Rennes' 1987 ISDN experiment, network organization in 96-98 and commercialization of ISDN and later DSL, in Brittany, from 1998 to 2002)
smm11 5y ago
Another one of these things that could have steered us all a different way, if only.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
A friend showed me Minitel in 1994, and I was half-surprised, half-not-surprised that even on this entirely text-based system, there was still porn (or at least, "visual erotica"). Human nature, eh?
- fabrice_d 5y ago
  The so-called "Minitel Rose" (all the erotica chat services) services were a cash cow for France Telecom, bringing in billions every year. Xavier Niel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel) started his empire with a sex oriented chat service.
  - whiplash451 5y ago
    Billions might be a little oversized.
    - fabrice_d 5y ago
      According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel : In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million ($1,121 million) of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.
    - linschn 5y ago
      It's close if you count it in francs, and include all services. This article [0] says that France Telecome gave 700 M FRF to the operators, which means that 1,050 M FRF were collected in 1986 alone. [0] https://www.nouvelobs.com/tech/20170804.OBS3007/l-age-d-or-du-36-15-le-minitel-roi-des-services-et-de-la-drague-virtuelle.html#modal-msg https://www.nouvelobs.com/tech/20170804.OBS3007/l-age-d-or-d...
aero-glide2 5y ago
Read about this in Computer networking : a top down approach, fascinating story.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Hm. Seems like just another implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex to me. Which I didn't like that much because of the german https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext , which reminded me of the stuff you could get on TV, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice, the german always seemed scammy, somehow.
- dboreham 5y ago
  The key difference is that every household in France was provided with a Minitel terminal, on the theory that this would be lower cost than printing phone books. So adoption was high.
- nbuet 5y ago
  Very different. It was really a query/answer based system with built in monetization. You want to check credit of a company, find someone is an obscure directory, talk with some 1996 onlyFan chick? Minitel could do. Also, online MMORPG (check car crash).
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice It was highly pushed by the national telco. The telco lent terminals for free so they were easily available, and there were tons of useful services, especially but not only from national companies: starting from the 80s you had stocks, online shopping, travel reservations, information services, message boards, databases[0], games, dating sites, ... Monetisation / payment was integrated from the start, through the phone bill: just like premium-rate phone numbers, minitel had premium-rate services (both first and third party), so you could make money out of valuable services. It was nothing compared to the modern web (~25000 services and about $1bn revenue at its height), but for the mid-80s to mid-90s and out of a population of 60m it was quite massive. [0] trying to get rid of phonebooks was a big reason for minitel in the first place
  - fmajid 5y ago
EGreg 5y ago
To me, the Web and VOIP are two great examples of open, permissionless, decentralized plaforms totally disrupting centralized services of the day, and hugely boosting the cost and effectiveness of publishing and telecommunications. And why I believe Web2 should have something like Wordpress to take on Big Tech. And why I think Web3 should move past grift and peer to peer protocols, and to applications to holistivally serve entire communities. (https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf) PS: I have put my money where my mouth is and built exactly this, over 10 years with no VC funding, and it’s profitable. Qbix for Web2 and Intercoin for Web3 https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
elvis70 5y ago
In the 1989 song Goodbye Marylou, Michel Polnareff evokes sentimental relationships via Minitel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxGLcJgpcEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxGLcJgpcEg
Cupertino95014 5y ago
The Minitel was pretty nice. I saw one in 1989 on a trip to Paris. An important fact hinted at below is: you got the bill as part of your monthly phone bill. Probably the most common use, not all that interesting to us, was replacing 411 (remember that? I don't think that was the Information number in France.) Besides porn, it also had online dating.
- linschn 5y ago
  The number was 12. It was discontinued in the early 2000 IIRC. You would call, get a human operator and could make complex queries like get the number of somebody you knew the sound of the name (but not the exact way of writing it) in a town or around a specific area, and the operator would help you find the number. Also in France, 15 is medical services, 17 is the police and 18 are the firefighters. By calling 112 anywhere in Europe you'll get an English speaking operator that can dispatch any emergency service.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > it also had online dating. In Brazil (São Paulo) we had a similar, Minitel-based, system. No online dating, but I met my first wife in a chatroom. It also had banking and you could transfer money to different banks with it. Initially I got an MSX computer with a modem (at that time the telco rented out the computer instead of a dedicated terminal for a ridiculously low fee), which was also useful for connecting to local BBSs. Later on I gave the MSX back (should never have done that - it was an unremarkable computer, but a pretty good videogame) and added a V.23 modem to my Apple II+ clone. The system continued to evolve, started accepting 1200 and 2400 bps inbound connections (which made it more accessible, because V.23 modems were not easy to come by). Last time I used it was with Windows 95 and its terminal software. Legend says the system ran on Multics on a Honeywell-Bull mainframe, making me an actual Multics user.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  The internet also was billed by the phone companies at first ! I suppose everywhere was the same but this was not like a surprising thing when we had only one telco company around 2000.
jackofalltrades 5y ago
this episode of command line heroes talks about the minitel (https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-7/world https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-7/world) Season 7 of the podcast is all about the first times of the web.
bernardlunn 5y ago
And in UK we had Prestel, also ahead of its time but run by a telco and disrupted by the PC. I woz there, said the old Geezer
- mfuzzey 5y ago
  Yes Prestel was the same technology as minitel. But the French bootstrapped the ecosystem by giving everyone who wanted it a free minitel instead of a printed directory which didn't happen in the UK, due to that Prestel never really took off.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I'd forgotten Prestel. Didn't Prestel have one of the first Internet gateways in the UK? I seem to cast my mind back to the early 90s and the few hundred of us on the Internet mostly had Prestel IPs.
pkaye 5y ago
I remember back in the late 80s the SF BART stations used to have terminals for something similar to Minitel. It had crude color vector graphics and a menu based system. A little sluggish to since it was probably using modems. Mainly just BART and local information. I used to play with them while waiting for trains with my family.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jgrahamc 5y ago
I own two Minitels. I made a connector (https://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 https://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361) that allows me to use one as a serial terminal and it works nicely with a Raspberry Pi/stty. I am in the process of writing my own firmware for the other one. One of my Minitels acting as a terminal over a serial cable I made... displaying jgc.org via Lynx: https://imgur.com/a/ecmvfMj https://imgur.com/a/ecmvfMj
vmception 5y ago
Protip: this is where we are at with Web3 right now. People are excited because they can build, any state you see is not the end all be all, and can be changed... by you! It's also very lucrative, more than FAANG while using a simpler stack to deploy a product, so that will keep attracting builders and their networks.
doe88 5y ago
At this point, Minitel has become kind of Rorschachtest for france, some see forward engineering, some see decline, some bureaucracy... What's great, is one can project almost anything on it. (disclosure, i'm french)
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Was it not all of those things? I mean it certainly took great engineering to build a such network, and at the same time placing all computing/resources in the center ensured its decline, an approach which is typical of french engineering from higher schools bureaucrats.
yodsanklai 5y ago
I have fond memories of Minitel. I remember chatting with other kids on forums when I was about 10 years old. It was really the web before the web. The only issue was that it was incredibly expensive (except for a few services). But it was revolutionary in the sense that within a couple of years, almost every family had one and became connected. Overall, it was a much faster adoption than internet: it wasn't until the smartphone that everybody was online, before that lots of families didn't have the mean or the skills to operate a computer. Not mentioning that Windows was such a mess. My father bought a PC which became so slow that he couldn't even use it anymore.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  I remember chatting with non-kids as a kid ahaha and we'd go with my friends to meetup chats and just bullshit around. The internet exploded this ofc, and I suppose you've been to the Skyrock IRC web frontend in your youth, which was the seediest place for us at the time :D
ubermonkey 5y ago
I remember being shown the minitel in the early 90s, and being AMAZED.
dang 5y ago
Some past related threads (if anyone's curious): Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 - Oct 2021 (2 comments) Old School Minitel Laptop: 7 Steps (With Pictures) – Instructables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 - Oct 2021 (1 comment) Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 - Oct 2021 (3 comments) The Rise and Fall of Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 - Dec 2020 (23 comments) Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 - Sept 2020 (196 comments) Log on Like It’s 1985: A Fragment of Minitel Returns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 - Dec 2018 (9 comments) Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 - Jan 2018 (67 comments) Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 - Oct 2017 (15 comments) Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 - July 2017 (107 comments) Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 - June 2017 (53 comments) Minitel, France's precursor to the Web, to go dark 30/6/12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 - June 2012 (32 comments) Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 - June 2012 (21 comments) How France fell out of love with Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 - June 2012 (1 comment) France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 - July 2011 (46 comments)
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
(2017)! Bunch of discussion a year or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744
maxired 5y ago
I remember ads in Video Game magazine claiming you could get free video games. You would actually pay by dialing 1 Hour or so on a very expensive service.
legulere 5y ago
In Germany we had something similar called BTX that included online banking in 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/business/high-technology-brings-small-bank-into-german-homes.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/business/high-technology-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
josefrichter 5y ago
Is there a place in France, probably a technical museum, where one can still try functional Minitel terminal? Or maybe an online "demo"?
- topicseed 5y ago
  http://3611.re/ http://3611.re/ to have a feel
  - efrecon 5y ago
    This is great! Fully functional and works (as in: is able to look up people and their numbers). Brings back old fond memories!
  - loulouxiv 5y ago
    This was the only free service I think. More streamlined than pagesjaunes.fr for a long time
  - Orphis 5y ago
    And it's not even dummy data, I was able to look up relatives on it :o
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Not many Jean Valjeans in there... :p
FiddlerClamp 5y ago
Traveling through Paris in 1989 I met a guy who had a terminal at his place, and explained to me what a boon it was for gay guys to meet up with each other, socialize, and make friends. I have no doubt that gay men partly drove Minitel adoption (along with other technologies like group phone chat lines, dating apps, and so on).
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Yes, we'd go to gay minitel sites as kids to giggle at their personals...
mastazi 5y ago
In Italy, the same service was called Videotel[0] and the terminals were sold by the state-owned phone company, Sip. there was a model where the keyboard would slide out from under the CRT screen[1], and another model where the hinged keyboard would fold onto the screen (similar to a laptop keyboard, except in this case it's the keyboard that folds up, not the screen that folds down)[2]. I remember in my area some pubs had these, they were on the tables and you could use them while you were there, it was the first time in my life that I was chatting with someone on the other side of the globe. (I had tried visiting some of the popular BBS on my Amiga to look at cool stuff but had never actually exchanged messages with anyone online). It was cool because you could talk to perfect strangers but sometimes the discussion would go deep. I remember I was so excited about it and my friends were too. I think in the modern Internet we don't really have something like that. [0] (Italian Wikipedia) - https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel [1] (picture) https://forum.telefonino.net/images_fotodb/pict001494862_7_1239010453.jpg https://forum.telefonino.net/images_fotodb/pict001494862_7_1... [2] (picture) https://i.ebayimg.com/00/z/3UcAAOSwT5RdB2AU/$_59.JPG https://i.ebayimg.com/00/z/3UcAAOSwT5RdB2AU/$_59.JPG
- southerntofu 5y ago
  IRC chatrooms, PUBNIXes and forums are alive and well. Just because half the Internet has moved to Facebook/Discord and uploaded a profile picture doesn't mean you can't have profound pseudonymous communications with random people on the other side of the globe anymore.
watersb 5y ago
My first computer, the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer, was a no-modem version of a VideoText terminal. Inspired by Minitel, the idea was that farmers would check in daily to track spot-market prices of agricultural commodities. If this description is just noise, word salad... well. It didn't make much sense to farmers, either.
lsllc 5y ago
The UK had Teletext: https://theconversation.com/teletext-was-slow-but-it-paved-the-way-for-the-super-fast-world-of-the-internet-124118 https://theconversation.com/teletext-was-slow-but-it-paved-t...
- Johnythree 5y ago
  Telextext was was very popular in Australia as well. Was called Viatel.
- thematrixturtle 5y ago
  Teletext was popular in much of Europe, but the big difference to Minitel is that it was essentially broadcast only: you could browse pages, but not contribute to them. This obviously vastly limited its utility, since things like reservations and chat services were not possible.
npunt 5y ago
This reminds me of the Nortel Displayphone [1], a similar all-in-one computer with 1200bps modem and keyboard. By the time I got mine from a friend in ~1992 it was already way outclassed by PCs, but I loved the hardware integration and the alt-future it suggested. I used it to log into a few BBSes before getting bored with the slow speed and amber monochrome screen. If I'd been older & had one in the early/mid 80s I'm sure it would have been a big part of my life. Related, in Santa Monica where I grew up we had one of the first municipally operated BBSes in the world called PEN [2][3] that was primarily accessible from the library and other public terminals. I remember it was pretty fascinating but something that was more for adults so I never really used it much. One thing I loved about the BBS era (1980s to about ~1995) was that everything was distinctly local, due to long distance charges. It added a layer of meaning and rootedness to online activities thats impossible to recapture now. [1] http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/disphone/index.htm http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/disphone/index.htm [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160313225121/https://www.wired.com/1994/01/pen/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160313225121/https://www.wired... [3] See page 77: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11860/32905494-MIT.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11860/3290549...
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Where do you live? Don't you think some folks from your neighborhood would appreciate some local services? A local goods exchange (craigslist-like), a local chatroom, and a local media library full of movies and documentaries? It makes even more sense if you can do it on LAN, which can be an incentive to develop your own local ISP (which you should do for other more serious political reasons anyway)... :-)
  - npunt 5y ago
    I think it's more that the cultural opportunity has passed for local-first digital experiences, where the world's affairs are far away and local affairs are close. Let alone the increasingly challenged defaultness of the physical world. We're way too connected for connection to be special anymore, unless we all decide to take a few steps back from the digital world. Perhaps in other cultures and contexts (probably far smaller and tight-knit ones) it may be possible to build the kind of infrastructure to enhance civic spirit, but I fear in the US at least it'd devolve into Nextdoor-style neighbor gripes which are mostly indistinguishable from the arguments on any other fora.

266 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

I currently work for the person who helped start US Videotel and I still haven't scratched much of the surface about all of it with him. Everything about Minitel and US Videotel reminds me of what was depicted in seasons 2 and 3 of Halt and Catch Fire. I always wondered if Minitel was their inspiration for the Mutiny software.

wmf 5y ago
To me Mutiny looks like Lucasfilm Habitat down to the UI and C64 platform. https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html
- ulkesh 5y ago
  Ah, didn't know about that. The concepts seem to be very similar, though. In US Videotel at least, there was a community function in addition to the various other functions the system provided (stocks, weather, etc). Thanks for the info!
- kingcharles 5y ago
  This reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, arguably the greatest contribution Microsoft made to computer science: https://chrisgliddon.com/a-trip-down-memory-lane-microsoft-comic-chat-6f23b8a64295 https://chrisgliddon.com/a-trip-down-memory-lane-microsoft-c...

cf100clunk 5y ago

See also Telidon, a Canadian technology that had similar goals to Minitel but saw only limited implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telidon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telidon

athenot 5y ago

It ran on V.23, which was 1200 bits/s down and 75 bits/s up, but could be reversed in case one wanted to upload / type stuff. Once modems were widespread, it was a lot better to use Minitel emulators on a computer, as one could record and replay sessions after disconnection—a key aspect since most Minitel numbers were billed at premium rates, to allow services to be monetized. </memories>

markharper 5y ago

Notably a core plot device in the French Home Alone style film Deadly Games (aka Dial Code Santa). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Games_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Games_(film)

dmix 5y ago
The trailer is like a Bizarro world Home Alone https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/ Now I’m curious if the Home Alone screenwriter watched it.
- elvis70 5y ago
  John Hughes watched it at the festival of Cannes in 1989, after this article (in French): https://www.bfmtv.com/people/3615-code-pere-noel-le-film-francais-culte-qui-a-inspire-maman-j-ai-rate-l-avion_AN-202012240039.html https://www.bfmtv.com/people/3615-code-pere-noel-le-film-fra...
  - dmix 5y ago
    This has always been a great business idea. Watch good foreign films and spin them into Americanized versions then pitch them to Hollywood. Also I find it amusing that Home Alone in France is titled "Mom, I missed the plane"
    - elvis70 5y ago
      At least, René Manzor was eventually hired by Amblin.
    - uoaei 5y ago
      Intellectual property theft is a great business idea, you're right! Quite the condemnation of both social constructs :)
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > Watch good foreign films and spin them into Americanized versions That's the entire history of Hollywood and american music industry. Those businesses who wouldn't like us to share made their fortunes on entirely borrowed things from other cultures. Many of the great revered american singers copied note-for-note traditional african songs, for example.

louissan 5y ago

I remember being nearly murdered by my parents after they received the phone bill via the (physical, paper-based in those days :-) ) mail. The minitel promptly was locked out of reach of the family's children .... still, good days. They even had games! 36.15 ...

jpoesen 5y ago
A little too much of 3615 ZAZA perhaps?
- louissan 5y ago
  hah I wish I could have. But... in hindsight ... no. Teenage wet fantasies and all that :-)
thamer 5y ago
For context for "36.15": you would access Minitel services by typing a numeric code followed by a short textual name, the most common code being 3615. Advertisements for Minitel services would say something like "Dial 3615 HOTSTUFF to meet a passionate lover". A lot of these services were adult chat, games, or extremely low-res porn, and it was easy to rack up a massive phone bill by connecting to them (you'd have to remember to disconnect, too!). Another very common use cases was phone book lookups. Think of it as a physical terminal for a ncurses-style terminal app using a remote client, with the display updating line by line with a scanning cursor as you received data. There's an example of what that looked like in this short documentary about Minitel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s – every single page loaded line by line that way.
- glandium 5y ago
  More precisely, the minitel would call 36 15, which would open a page on which you type the short textual name and press enter, which would then connect you to the service you want. And the terminal would tell you the cost per minute of the service.
5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

If anything it was so far ahead of the early web that it hindered adoption of the WWW in France. It was incredibly good and rich, many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers. It took at least until 1996 before the web could compete and by that time France reluctantly started to let go of their beloved tiny terminals. It took until 2012 (!!) before it was finally decommissioned, but by then there really wasn't much left of it to be turned off.

jbkiv 5y ago
I was inspired by the Minitel to start Esurance in 1997. The Minitel of course had porn (more Craigslist type "offerings" from real people) but also reservations, travel, and...INSURANCE! You are totally correct, it was so efficient that it delayed the adoption of the worldwide web. Of course France wanted something in FRENCH (!). As I was raising money in Europe for Esurance, the French executives would look down on me and say "we have the Minitel, we want nothing to do with your Internet" :-)
cm2187 5y ago
And it solved a problem I’d argue the internet hasn’t solved yet: how to charge users securely, easily and for small amounts. The way it did that is through your phone bill, since the minitel was using your phone line. No credit card number to enter (and be hacked), no credentials to enter. Of course it also meant kids had access to it…
- sofixa 5y ago
  Web Monetization, Coil.com, Interledger are trying to solve that same problem [1] but honestly It's doubtful it will work. 1 - I've written about this here https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetization-if-you-want-less-ads-on-the-web/ https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati... and it was widely, if mostly negatively, discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857
  - 5y ago

miki123211 5y ago

Let's not forget that Minitel couldn't be as great as it was if not for its complete and utter centralization. Sometimes having twenty slightly different services that are blocked from interoperating for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all.

LeanderK 5y ago
> for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that great after all. For some this is not some abstract notion but a real worry. I am glad the internet started decentralised.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Minitel was probably subject to substantial government regulation, unlike the "tech" companies that dominate the web and overinfluence the internet. Minitel was probably funded at least in part through taxation. Certainly, Minitel was not a secretive Silicon Valley-styled company with dual class shares or other entrenching governance structures, that allow for concentration of voting power in the hands of company insiders, through disproportionate allocation of voting rights among shareholders. It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do. Regardless of the public opinion toward telecom, it has historically been subject to far more regulation than so-called "tech" companies operating websites. Sadly, some of today's telecom companies try to emulate or piggyback on the privacy violating behaviour of "Big Tech". Centralisation/decentralisation is an interesting debate, but if the issue is privacy then, IMO, one also needs to consider the question of regulation/deregulation. Perhaps Minitel was an example of a regulated, government-supported public computer networking service that worked very well. Silicon Valley and its charlatan ideology is a privacy disaster. It is probably a threat to the survival of democratic societies as we know them.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do. Oh yes we do. France Telecom back in the day wasn't all that bad, but the prices were crazy: copper is expensive but not so much that you should pay every month dozens of francs (before the euro, don't remember the exact number) without even paying for usage. But at least from what i remember tech support and intervention times were decent before the Internet, then came Wanadoo and then the privatization of France Télécom into Orange and now we have shitty service like everyone else.

bertil 5y ago

I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL, the technology that made computer networks easy to expand to every house, and the general idea that the Internet could be a domestic technology. Until the late 80s, the Internet was a military and gradually academic tool, but even until the mid-90s, having an internet connection at home was quaint outside of France where accessing your official records, buying certain things online was a convenient reality. TCP/IP and Tier 1 networks were only one half of the story, and the far smaller, easier half: connecting every country is a matter of a few big projects; connecting everyone is something, that to this day, many still struggle with. There’s an occasional mention of Cepremades as an inspiration for the Internet Protocol, some technicality about Alohanet, but never a history of why that should be in everyone’s living room, except a mysterious prescient and unhelpful AOL, their omnipresent CD, and nothing about the government-sponsored, centralised project to make cheap modulator-demodulator use long copper wires — something that proved both incredibly difficult and relevant.

AlbertCory 5y ago
Well, you're right that the Minitel was more easily obtainable, but there WERE CompuServe, Prodigy, and other private services in the US before the Internet took off. Those had some pretty large subscriber bases; nothing like now, of course.
JPLeRouzic 5y ago
> I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL Do you mean for digital technologies or for specifically DSL? As I remember up to 1996 there was no commercial DSL in France, but there were excellent ISDN coverage (with rate up to 128kbits/sec with two channels). However it was quite expensive and when DSL was commercialized in France, it was cheaper at the basic rate of 512Kbits/sec. ISDN commercialization started around 1988 in France. In 1996 the Network part of FT started to think how to open the network to higher bandwidth, and it was not so easy because the internal backbone was built on ATM as it was used by Minitel users. Some years later (2002?) with declining Minitel revenues, FT decided to give the priority to DSL, with an adequate IP backbone. (Source: It's only from my memories, I was involved in Rennes' 1987 ISDN experiment, network organization in 96-98 and commercialization of ISDN and later DSL, in Brittany, from 1998 to 2002)

smm11 5y ago

Another one of these things that could have steered us all a different way, if only.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

A friend showed me Minitel in 1994, and I was half-surprised, half-not-surprised that even on this entirely text-based system, there was still porn (or at least, "visual erotica"). Human nature, eh?

fabrice_d 5y ago
The so-called "Minitel Rose" (all the erotica chat services) services were a cash cow for France Telecom, bringing in billions every year. Xavier Niel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel) started his empire with a sex oriented chat service.
- whiplash451 5y ago
  Billions might be a little oversized.
  - fabrice_d 5y ago
    According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel : In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million ($1,121 million) of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.
  - linschn 5y ago
    It's close if you count it in francs, and include all services. This article [0] says that France Telecome gave 700 M FRF to the operators, which means that 1,050 M FRF were collected in 1986 alone. [0] https://www.nouvelobs.com/tech/20170804.OBS3007/l-age-d-or-du-36-15-le-minitel-roi-des-services-et-de-la-drague-virtuelle.html#modal-msg https://www.nouvelobs.com/tech/20170804.OBS3007/l-age-d-or-d...

aero-glide2 5y ago

Read about this in Computer networking : a top down approach, fascinating story.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

Hm. Seems like just another implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex to me. Which I didn't like that much because of the german https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext , which reminded me of the stuff you could get on TV, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice, the german always seemed scammy, somehow.

dboreham 5y ago
The key difference is that every household in France was provided with a Minitel terminal, on the theory that this would be lower cost than printing phone books. So adoption was high.
nbuet 5y ago
Very different. It was really a query/answer based system with built in monetization. You want to check credit of a company, find someone is an obscure directory, talk with some 1996 onlyFan chick? Minitel could do. Also, online MMORPG (check car crash).
masklinn 5y ago
> Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice It was highly pushed by the national telco. The telco lent terminals for free so they were easily available, and there were tons of useful services, especially but not only from national companies: starting from the 80s you had stocks, online shopping, travel reservations, information services, message boards, databases[0], games, dating sites, ... Monetisation / payment was integrated from the start, through the phone bill: just like premium-rate phone numbers, minitel had premium-rate services (both first and third party), so you could make money out of valuable services. It was nothing compared to the modern web (~25000 services and about $1bn revenue at its height), but for the mid-80s to mid-90s and out of a population of 60m it was quite massive. [0] trying to get rid of phonebooks was a big reason for minitel in the first place
- fmajid 5y ago

EGreg 5y ago

To me, the Web and VOIP are two great examples of open, permissionless, decentralized plaforms totally disrupting centralized services of the day, and hugely boosting the cost and effectiveness of publishing and telecommunications. And why I believe Web2 should have something like Wordpress to take on Big Tech. And why I think Web3 should move past grift and peer to peer protocols, and to applications to holistivally serve entire communities. (https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf) PS: I have put my money where my mouth is and built exactly this, over 10 years with no VC funding, and it’s profitable. Qbix for Web2 and Intercoin for Web3 https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf

elvis70 5y ago

In the 1989 song Goodbye Marylou, Michel Polnareff evokes sentimental relationships via Minitel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxGLcJgpcEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxGLcJgpcEg

Cupertino95014 5y ago

The Minitel was pretty nice. I saw one in 1989 on a trip to Paris. An important fact hinted at below is: you got the bill as part of your monthly phone bill. Probably the most common use, not all that interesting to us, was replacing 411 (remember that? I don't think that was the Information number in France.) Besides porn, it also had online dating.

linschn 5y ago
The number was 12. It was discontinued in the early 2000 IIRC. You would call, get a human operator and could make complex queries like get the number of somebody you knew the sound of the name (but not the exact way of writing it) in a town or around a specific area, and the operator would help you find the number. Also in France, 15 is medical services, 17 is the police and 18 are the firefighters. By calling 112 anywhere in Europe you'll get an English speaking operator that can dispatch any emergency service.
rbanffy 5y ago
> it also had online dating. In Brazil (São Paulo) we had a similar, Minitel-based, system. No online dating, but I met my first wife in a chatroom. It also had banking and you could transfer money to different banks with it. Initially I got an MSX computer with a modem (at that time the telco rented out the computer instead of a dedicated terminal for a ridiculously low fee), which was also useful for connecting to local BBSs. Later on I gave the MSX back (should never have done that - it was an unremarkable computer, but a pretty good videogame) and added a V.23 modem to my Apple II+ clone. The system continued to evolve, started accepting 1200 and 2400 bps inbound connections (which made it more accessible, because V.23 modems were not easy to come by). Last time I used it was with Windows 95 and its terminal software. Legend says the system ran on Multics on a Honeywell-Bull mainframe, making me an actual Multics user.
xwolfi 5y ago
The internet also was billed by the phone companies at first ! I suppose everywhere was the same but this was not like a surprising thing when we had only one telco company around 2000.

jackofalltrades 5y ago

this episode of command line heroes talks about the minitel (https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-7/world https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-7/world) Season 7 of the podcast is all about the first times of the web.

bernardlunn 5y ago

And in UK we had Prestel, also ahead of its time but run by a telco and disrupted by the PC. I woz there, said the old Geezer

mfuzzey 5y ago
Yes Prestel was the same technology as minitel. But the French bootstrapped the ecosystem by giving everyone who wanted it a free minitel instead of a printed directory which didn't happen in the UK, due to that Prestel never really took off.
kingcharles 5y ago
I'd forgotten Prestel. Didn't Prestel have one of the first Internet gateways in the UK? I seem to cast my mind back to the early 90s and the few hundred of us on the Internet mostly had Prestel IPs.

pkaye 5y ago

I remember back in the late 80s the SF BART stations used to have terminals for something similar to Minitel. It had crude color vector graphics and a menu based system. A little sluggish to since it was probably using modems. Mainly just BART and local information. I used to play with them while waiting for trains with my family.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jgrahamc 5y ago

I own two Minitels. I made a connector (https://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 https://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361) that allows me to use one as a serial terminal and it works nicely with a Raspberry Pi/stty. I am in the process of writing my own firmware for the other one. One of my Minitels acting as a terminal over a serial cable I made... displaying jgc.org via Lynx: https://imgur.com/a/ecmvfMj https://imgur.com/a/ecmvfMj

vmception 5y ago

Protip: this is where we are at with Web3 right now. People are excited because they can build, any state you see is not the end all be all, and can be changed... by you! It's also very lucrative, more than FAANG while using a simpler stack to deploy a product, so that will keep attracting builders and their networks.

doe88 5y ago

At this point, Minitel has become kind of Rorschachtest for france, some see forward engineering, some see decline, some bureaucracy... What's great, is one can project almost anything on it. (disclosure, i'm french)

southerntofu 5y ago
Was it not all of those things? I mean it certainly took great engineering to build a such network, and at the same time placing all computing/resources in the center ensured its decline, an approach which is typical of french engineering from higher schools bureaucrats.

yodsanklai 5y ago

I have fond memories of Minitel. I remember chatting with other kids on forums when I was about 10 years old. It was really the web before the web. The only issue was that it was incredibly expensive (except for a few services). But it was revolutionary in the sense that within a couple of years, almost every family had one and became connected. Overall, it was a much faster adoption than internet: it wasn't until the smartphone that everybody was online, before that lots of families didn't have the mean or the skills to operate a computer. Not mentioning that Windows was such a mess. My father bought a PC which became so slow that he couldn't even use it anymore.

xwolfi 5y ago
I remember chatting with non-kids as a kid ahaha and we'd go with my friends to meetup chats and just bullshit around. The internet exploded this ofc, and I suppose you've been to the Skyrock IRC web frontend in your youth, which was the seediest place for us at the time :D

ubermonkey 5y ago

I remember being shown the minitel in the early 90s, and being AMAZED.

dang 5y ago

Some past related threads (if anyone's curious): Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 - Oct 2021 (2 comments) Old School Minitel Laptop: 7 Steps (With Pictures) – Instructables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 - Oct 2021 (1 comment) Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 - Oct 2021 (3 comments) The Rise and Fall of Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 - Dec 2020 (23 comments) Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 - Sept 2020 (196 comments) Log on Like It’s 1985: A Fragment of Minitel Returns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 - Dec 2018 (9 comments) Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 - Jan 2018 (67 comments) Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 - Oct 2017 (15 comments) Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 - July 2017 (107 comments) Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 - June 2017 (53 comments) Minitel, France's precursor to the Web, to go dark 30/6/12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 - June 2012 (32 comments) Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 - June 2012 (21 comments) How France fell out of love with Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 - June 2012 (1 comment) France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 - July 2011 (46 comments)

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

(2017)! Bunch of discussion a year or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744

maxired 5y ago

I remember ads in Video Game magazine claiming you could get free video games. You would actually pay by dialing 1 Hour or so on a very expensive service.

legulere 5y ago

In Germany we had something similar called BTX that included online banking in 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/business/high-technology-brings-small-bank-into-german-homes.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/business/high-technology-...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

josefrichter 5y ago

Is there a place in France, probably a technical museum, where one can still try functional Minitel terminal? Or maybe an online "demo"?

topicseed 5y ago
http://3611.re/ http://3611.re/ to have a feel
- efrecon 5y ago
  This is great! Fully functional and works (as in: is able to look up people and their numbers). Brings back old fond memories!
- loulouxiv 5y ago
  This was the only free service I think. More streamlined than pagesjaunes.fr for a long time
- Orphis 5y ago
  And it's not even dummy data, I was able to look up relatives on it :o
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Not many Jean Valjeans in there... :p

FiddlerClamp 5y ago

Traveling through Paris in 1989 I met a guy who had a terminal at his place, and explained to me what a boon it was for gay guys to meet up with each other, socialize, and make friends. I have no doubt that gay men partly drove Minitel adoption (along with other technologies like group phone chat lines, dating apps, and so on).

xwolfi 5y ago
Yes, we'd go to gay minitel sites as kids to giggle at their personals...

mastazi 5y ago

In Italy, the same service was called Videotel[0] and the terminals were sold by the state-owned phone company, Sip. there was a model where the keyboard would slide out from under the CRT screen[1], and another model where the hinged keyboard would fold onto the screen (similar to a laptop keyboard, except in this case it's the keyboard that folds up, not the screen that folds down)[2]. I remember in my area some pubs had these, they were on the tables and you could use them while you were there, it was the first time in my life that I was chatting with someone on the other side of the globe. (I had tried visiting some of the popular BBS on my Amiga to look at cool stuff but had never actually exchanged messages with anyone online). It was cool because you could talk to perfect strangers but sometimes the discussion would go deep. I remember I was so excited about it and my friends were too. I think in the modern Internet we don't really have something like that. [0] (Italian Wikipedia) - https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel [1] (picture) https://forum.telefonino.net/images_fotodb/pict001494862_7_1239010453.jpg https://forum.telefonino.net/images_fotodb/pict001494862_7_1... [2] (picture) https://i.ebayimg.com/00/z/3UcAAOSwT5RdB2AU/$_59.JPG https://i.ebayimg.com/00/z/3UcAAOSwT5RdB2AU/$_59.JPG

southerntofu 5y ago
IRC chatrooms, PUBNIXes and forums are alive and well. Just because half the Internet has moved to Facebook/Discord and uploaded a profile picture doesn't mean you can't have profound pseudonymous communications with random people on the other side of the globe anymore.

watersb 5y ago

My first computer, the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer, was a no-modem version of a VideoText terminal. Inspired by Minitel, the idea was that farmers would check in daily to track spot-market prices of agricultural commodities. If this description is just noise, word salad... well. It didn't make much sense to farmers, either.

lsllc 5y ago

The UK had Teletext: https://theconversation.com/teletext-was-slow-but-it-paved-the-way-for-the-super-fast-world-of-the-internet-124118 https://theconversation.com/teletext-was-slow-but-it-paved-t...

Johnythree 5y ago
Telextext was was very popular in Australia as well. Was called Viatel.
thematrixturtle 5y ago
Teletext was popular in much of Europe, but the big difference to Minitel is that it was essentially broadcast only: you could browse pages, but not contribute to them. This obviously vastly limited its utility, since things like reservations and chat services were not possible.

npunt 5y ago

This reminds me of the Nortel Displayphone [1], a similar all-in-one computer with 1200bps modem and keyboard. By the time I got mine from a friend in ~1992 it was already way outclassed by PCs, but I loved the hardware integration and the alt-future it suggested. I used it to log into a few BBSes before getting bored with the slow speed and amber monochrome screen. If I'd been older & had one in the early/mid 80s I'm sure it would have been a big part of my life. Related, in Santa Monica where I grew up we had one of the first municipally operated BBSes in the world called PEN [2][3] that was primarily accessible from the library and other public terminals. I remember it was pretty fascinating but something that was more for adults so I never really used it much. One thing I loved about the BBS era (1980s to about ~1995) was that everything was distinctly local, due to long distance charges. It added a layer of meaning and rootedness to online activities thats impossible to recapture now. [1] http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/disphone/index.htm http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/disphone/index.htm [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160313225121/https://www.wired.com/1994/01/pen/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160313225121/https://www.wired... [3] See page 77: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11860/32905494-MIT.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11860/3290549...

southerntofu 5y ago
Where do you live? Don't you think some folks from your neighborhood would appreciate some local services? A local goods exchange (craigslist-like), a local chatroom, and a local media library full of movies and documentaries? It makes even more sense if you can do it on LAN, which can be an incentive to develop your own local ISP (which you should do for other more serious political reasons anyway)... :-)
- npunt 5y ago
  I think it's more that the cultural opportunity has passed for local-first digital experiences, where the world's affairs are far away and local affairs are close. Let alone the increasingly challenged defaultness of the physical world. We're way too connected for connection to be special anymore, unless we all decide to take a few steps back from the digital world. Perhaps in other cultures and contexts (probably far smaller and tight-knit ones) it may be possible to build the kind of infrastructure to enhance civic spirit, but I fear in the US at least it'd devolve into Nextdoor-style neighbor gripes which are mostly indistinguishable from the arguments on any other fora.