>Look at the French very very imaginative. They are providing over 30 million terminals in homes, free of charge, despite the fact they are going to cost someth

>Look at the French very very imaginative. They are providing over 30 million terminals in homes, free of charge, despite the fact they are going to cost something about £40 each because it is cheaper than producing telephone directories. And once the terminal is in, once it's there, the incentive is to use it for other things, obviously. So, it's marvelous marketing. It is cheaper over time for the French than bring out telephone directories every 2 years. You just plug in to the central computer, you find your numbers at the same time you can find all sorts of other things. You'll be using word processors and text processors as information units as links in an information chain, not just to type. And when that happens, when you can get the technology into the home, when you can get the technology away from the office, when you have word processors and text processors talking to other text processors and that point you don't need the middleman or -woman, do you? He is referring to the very successful story of Minitel[0](Videotex) which began to be implemented widely in 1982. It is relatively unknown outside of France but in France just part of their naturally shared "(3516-)" IT history; peaking in 2000 with around 25 million users (40% of the population). Xavier Niel, a french billionaire, made his first million by launching a "sex oriented chat service" colloquially known as Minitel rose in 1987 at the age of 19. For [1] anyone who wants to dig deeper into that very peculiar french history. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel [1]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g