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As a French, I remember that absolutely every adult around me used to ridicule the minitel for its ugliness, slowness and overall lack of diverse use cases. At

As a French, I remember that absolutely every adult around me used to ridicule the minitel for its ugliness, slowness and overall lack of diverse use cases. At best, it was a slow Yellow Pages. At worst, sex services ("minitel rose", it was called). Back in 202x, I see many times a year articles shared about the minitel, including here in HN, praising its ahead-of-time platform, glorified as a pre-internet era. It is funny, in a fascinating way, how it is retrospectively revered.

navaati 4y ago
That’s funny, I remember it as "that stuff you can book train tickets on" that only nerdy dads use, but mostly too expensive to be really useful :).
athenot 4y ago
It was slow and ugly by today's standards but you could still do actual e-commerce well before the web was ready, like buy a train ticket without having to talk to a human.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  I've always heard that e-commerce was enabled by encryption (otherwise no one would type in their credit card / bank details over cleartext) -- what method did minitel use to take payment? Maybe you had an account with the vendor and they billed you out-of-band or something?
  - wmf 4y ago
    I've always heard that e-commerce was enabled by encryption (otherwise no one would type in their credit card / bank details over cleartext) That's because the Internet is an open network where packets pass through multiple ISPs, you don't know what path packets will take, and sniffing packets is easy. Minitel was presumably a mostly closed system managed by a single telco who could keep out bad actors.
  - hyakosm 4y ago
    In the 90s, one of the most expensive Minitel, the Magis, had a card reader on the side, probably working like a point of sale terminal. [0] The overlay of X.25 Transpac network on IP for payment terminals was cut off 2 weeks ago. [1] [0] https://wiki.labomedia.org/images/1/19/MinitelMagisClub.pdf https://wiki.labomedia.org/images/1/19/MinitelMagisClub.pdf [1] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1543841021091528704 https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1543841021091528704
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Minitel was a direct modem connection to the service, you also had a payment method on file with them. You weren't sending your credit card info in plaintext across the Internet. Being a direct modem connection, even if you had to provide card details, it would be no less secure than dictating them over the phone to an agent.
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    Anything you bought was charged to your telephone account.
  - llsf 4y ago
    That was kinda the beauty of the minitel. You did not have to provide anything. The traffic coming from your telephone line was charged to your telephone bill. That created some household drama... Who spent 200 francs on porn last month ? I was carefully limiting my usage to free services, or paid services where I could cut (literally) the connection before the 1 or 2 free minutes. Memories...
    - galgot 4y ago
      My brother managed to spend 2000 Fr in a month, connecting at night. As you said big "household drama" when parents discovered the bill... But, I think he got his first date with Minitel help :D
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  These kind of useful services were almost all provided by state owned entities (train tickets fit the bill). Other that train, you could also apply for national exams and get the results. That's also why you ended up keeping a box in your home that only help in very specific occasions (except if you're taking the train two times a week), and most people would just go to the local post office to use the freely available Minitel when really needed. I think the worst part was that many of these services were late to embrace internet partly because of the Minitel being a stopgap.
th0ma5 4y ago
All the BBSes back in the day were awful, the key thing here is it was a network arguably targeted at normies before many other things like the web. Maybe AOL eventually too sure, but Compuserve was way more expensive and not a everyday person thing.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > All the BBSes back in the day were awful Remember when Minitel was launched all computers were quite awful. A reasonable one would have an 80-column 25-line monochrome display, while most home computers had 40-columns and 24 or 25 lines (and some color). There were a couple graphics standards, such as Tek 4010/4 and ReGIS, but very few terminals supported them.
cm2187 4y ago
Let's keep in mind the minitel was launched in the early 80s, a long long time before the www. And by the 1990s websites design, it wasn't that ugly (most 56k modems also acted as minitel clients so you could use it on your computer). It's only by the mid 2000s that it became obsolete as the www became mainstream.
boudin 4y ago
I was a kid back then but I remember people liking it overall. The speed was standard for its time. The UX was quite good, in some way better than the web for people who had a hard time with computers (punch a number on your phone, press a button on the machine, enter a code, usually just a word or the company name) et voilà! This needs to be put in perspective, it was the first network of its scale, and it preceded the web for interactive services. When it was rolled out personal computers were far from being a common thing in households, many people in the computer field believing that PCs were toys with not much purposes
bigmattystyles 4y ago
"Je ferai plus 36 15 ULLA"
- fabiensanglard 4y ago
  Vachement beaucoup!
fabiensanglard 4y ago
I was a kid/teenager at the time and I was forbidden from even touching the thing because it was so expensive to use.
- llsf 4y ago
  well, as long as you were not dialing 3615, you were fine :)
enqk 4y ago
When I look back at it, I think the lowest common denominator it provided ensured at the very least we did not have the huge variance in quality of websites we have today, the broken date widgets, the pointless animations and branding. When it comes to buying tickets online, I'd rather have something today that's as simple as the Minitel
walrus01 4y ago
To what extent was the minitel widespread and commonly used by people compared to dialup BBSes? It's my understanding that one of the reasons why BBS became popular in the US was free unlimited local calling, within your local calling area, which could cover a fairly large metro city sized geographic area such as Seattle or Chicago.
- fulmicoton 4y ago
  In the beginning of the 90s I'd say there was a minitel in maybe 30% of homes in France (maybe a computer in <5%). That was the preferred to look up a phone number / address, and checking exam results.
llsf 4y ago
My dad came one day in 1982 with one as they were given them for free. Plugged it, and gave me the manual to figure it out :) The minitel is an anomaly a sort of black swan. One of those brilliant idea that is not obvious, maybe even not for its creators. My mom (born in 1952) for the longest time was doing online shopping (La Redoute, CAMIF) through the minitel. She was doing her banking also through minitel. I got my exam results through minitel... watching those lines appearing one by one was nail-bitting! It was limited, but it still allowed my parents to do online shopping back in the 80's (40 years ago), and to some extent it put a lot of kids of my generation into computers. Even one French billionaire, Xavier Niel started with minitel "rose" (i.e. online porn) in mid-80's. The government paid for the R&D (CCETT) and the production (it was given for free at first). France was trying to come up with new technologies like the TGV (high speed train from 1981) or the phone card with EMV chip (1984) that you could use in booth to call (no more coins), and the minitel was one of them. 15 years later once at the University (like a mile away were the Minitel was born), my professor fondly reminded us the chaos when in 1985 the french government decided to distribute hundred of thousands of computers in all the schools, and that they had to train more than one hundred thousand teachers to computer science before the back to school. Fun times :)
- echoradio 4y ago
  So the French even had “Septembre éternel” before everyone else? ;)
- FranklinMaillot 4y ago
  > France was trying to come up with new technologies like the TGV (high speed train from 1981) or the phone card with EMV chip (1984) that you could use in booth to call (no more coins), and the minitel was one of them. Don't forget Bi-Bop (1991), the French mobile phone before mobile phones were a thing. To use it you had to find the blue and green sticker that marked the location of an antenna and stand next to it.
  - UncleSlacky 4y ago
    They tried something similar in the UK ("Rabbit") around the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> As a French, I remember that absolutely every adult around me used to ridicule the minitel for its ugliness, slowness and overall lack of diverse use cases. It’s funny because I have exactly the opposite experience. I know people who used the Minitel professionally to order components until it was decommissioned well past after the introduction of an equivalent internet service and still complain that the UX was quicker to use.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
What's wrong with sex services? Wouldn't expect the French of all people to be a bunch of prudes.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Money. Sex services cost a lot, and French people hate costly services with a passion.
lovich 4y ago
Does the Internet not contain a vast amount of ugly design, slow pages, and sex services? That’s just a function of humanity, the medium it’s expressed through doesn’t alter that. I think that many engineers laud the minitel network because it’s a legitimately separate design from the current internet monoculture which despite its seeming diversity on the surface, has some foundational technology that everyone uses. Like did minitel require using http? Did minitel have outages once or twice a year from a main provider wiping their bgp tables? Those aren’t even sarcastic questions, I’ve only lightly learned about minitel but was fascinated because I’m under the impression that they took a different tech tree than what The Internet has
mariuolo 4y ago
Here in Italy Videotel was exactly how you describe it, plus tarot readers. But I'm surprised, Minitel and to some extent, Prestel were touted as success stories even at the time.
shermozle 4y ago
It wasn't the look and feel that was impressive, it was what you could do with it. You could book train tickets, pay bills, do most interactions with government, order from catalog retailers. This at a time when most transactions in stores were paid by cheques still! Even after the Web exploded, it took almost a decade to get even close to the ubiquity of being able to do things _ONLINE_ everywhere else. As for the sex services, I can only assume that they were wildly popular given the amount of money spent advertising 3615 ULLA on every train and bus. Given the French penchant for adultery, I expect it was quite a convenient service.
- alex_duf 4y ago
  >Given the French penchant for adultery I'm sorry what?
rsynnott 4y ago
There was an article in a major US publication around 2000 where the journalist mentioned that they'd recently been to Europe, and they had an amazing new thing there which was much better than the internet! It was Teletext, which was introduced in 1974 and was certainly in decline by 2000.

navaati 4y ago

That’s funny, I remember it as "that stuff you can book train tickets on" that only nerdy dads use, but mostly too expensive to be really useful :).

athenot 4y ago

It was slow and ugly by today's standards but you could still do actual e-commerce well before the web was ready, like buy a train ticket without having to talk to a human.

jazzyjackson 4y ago
I've always heard that e-commerce was enabled by encryption (otherwise no one would type in their credit card / bank details over cleartext) -- what method did minitel use to take payment? Maybe you had an account with the vendor and they billed you out-of-band or something?
- wmf 4y ago
  I've always heard that e-commerce was enabled by encryption (otherwise no one would type in their credit card / bank details over cleartext) That's because the Internet is an open network where packets pass through multiple ISPs, you don't know what path packets will take, and sniffing packets is easy. Minitel was presumably a mostly closed system managed by a single telco who could keep out bad actors.
- hyakosm 4y ago
  In the 90s, one of the most expensive Minitel, the Magis, had a card reader on the side, probably working like a point of sale terminal. [0] The overlay of X.25 Transpac network on IP for payment terminals was cut off 2 weeks ago. [1] [0] https://wiki.labomedia.org/images/1/19/MinitelMagisClub.pdf https://wiki.labomedia.org/images/1/19/MinitelMagisClub.pdf [1] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1543841021091528704 https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1543841021091528704
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Minitel was a direct modem connection to the service, you also had a payment method on file with them. You weren't sending your credit card info in plaintext across the Internet. Being a direct modem connection, even if you had to provide card details, it would be no less secure than dictating them over the phone to an agent.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  Anything you bought was charged to your telephone account.
- llsf 4y ago
  That was kinda the beauty of the minitel. You did not have to provide anything. The traffic coming from your telephone line was charged to your telephone bill. That created some household drama... Who spent 200 francs on porn last month ? I was carefully limiting my usage to free services, or paid services where I could cut (literally) the connection before the 1 or 2 free minutes. Memories...
  - galgot 4y ago
    My brother managed to spend 2000 Fr in a month, connecting at night. As you said big "household drama" when parents discovered the bill... But, I think he got his first date with Minitel help :D
makeitdouble 4y ago
These kind of useful services were almost all provided by state owned entities (train tickets fit the bill). Other that train, you could also apply for national exams and get the results. That's also why you ended up keeping a box in your home that only help in very specific occasions (except if you're taking the train two times a week), and most people would just go to the local post office to use the freely available Minitel when really needed. I think the worst part was that many of these services were late to embrace internet partly because of the Minitel being a stopgap.

th0ma5 4y ago

All the BBSes back in the day were awful, the key thing here is it was a network arguably targeted at normies before many other things like the web. Maybe AOL eventually too sure, but Compuserve was way more expensive and not a everyday person thing.

rbanffy 4y ago
> All the BBSes back in the day were awful Remember when Minitel was launched all computers were quite awful. A reasonable one would have an 80-column 25-line monochrome display, while most home computers had 40-columns and 24 or 25 lines (and some color). There were a couple graphics standards, such as Tek 4010/4 and ReGIS, but very few terminals supported them.

cm2187 4y ago

Let's keep in mind the minitel was launched in the early 80s, a long long time before the www. And by the 1990s websites design, it wasn't that ugly (most 56k modems also acted as minitel clients so you could use it on your computer). It's only by the mid 2000s that it became obsolete as the www became mainstream.

boudin 4y ago

I was a kid back then but I remember people liking it overall. The speed was standard for its time. The UX was quite good, in some way better than the web for people who had a hard time with computers (punch a number on your phone, press a button on the machine, enter a code, usually just a word or the company name) et voilà! This needs to be put in perspective, it was the first network of its scale, and it preceded the web for interactive services. When it was rolled out personal computers were far from being a common thing in households, many people in the computer field believing that PCs were toys with not much purposes

bigmattystyles 4y ago

"Je ferai plus 36 15 ULLA"

fabiensanglard 4y ago
Vachement beaucoup!

fabiensanglard 4y ago

I was a kid/teenager at the time and I was forbidden from even touching the thing because it was so expensive to use.

llsf 4y ago
well, as long as you were not dialing 3615, you were fine :)

enqk 4y ago

When I look back at it, I think the lowest common denominator it provided ensured at the very least we did not have the huge variance in quality of websites we have today, the broken date widgets, the pointless animations and branding. When it comes to buying tickets online, I'd rather have something today that's as simple as the Minitel

walrus01 4y ago

To what extent was the minitel widespread and commonly used by people compared to dialup BBSes? It's my understanding that one of the reasons why BBS became popular in the US was free unlimited local calling, within your local calling area, which could cover a fairly large metro city sized geographic area such as Seattle or Chicago.

fulmicoton 4y ago
In the beginning of the 90s I'd say there was a minitel in maybe 30% of homes in France (maybe a computer in <5%). That was the preferred to look up a phone number / address, and checking exam results.

llsf 4y ago

My dad came one day in 1982 with one as they were given them for free. Plugged it, and gave me the manual to figure it out :) The minitel is an anomaly a sort of black swan. One of those brilliant idea that is not obvious, maybe even not for its creators. My mom (born in 1952) for the longest time was doing online shopping (La Redoute, CAMIF) through the minitel. She was doing her banking also through minitel. I got my exam results through minitel... watching those lines appearing one by one was nail-bitting! It was limited, but it still allowed my parents to do online shopping back in the 80's (40 years ago), and to some extent it put a lot of kids of my generation into computers. Even one French billionaire, Xavier Niel started with minitel "rose" (i.e. online porn) in mid-80's. The government paid for the R&D (CCETT) and the production (it was given for free at first). France was trying to come up with new technologies like the TGV (high speed train from 1981) or the phone card with EMV chip (1984) that you could use in booth to call (no more coins), and the minitel was one of them. 15 years later once at the University (like a mile away were the Minitel was born), my professor fondly reminded us the chaos when in 1985 the french government decided to distribute hundred of thousands of computers in all the schools, and that they had to train more than one hundred thousand teachers to computer science before the back to school. Fun times :)

echoradio 4y ago
So the French even had “Septembre éternel” before everyone else? ;)
FranklinMaillot 4y ago
> France was trying to come up with new technologies like the TGV (high speed train from 1981) or the phone card with EMV chip (1984) that you could use in booth to call (no more coins), and the minitel was one of them. Don't forget Bi-Bop (1991), the French mobile phone before mobile phones were a thing. To use it you had to find the blue and green sticker that marked the location of an antenna and stand next to it.
- UncleSlacky 4y ago
  They tried something similar in the UK ("Rabbit") around the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> As a French, I remember that absolutely every adult around me used to ridicule the minitel for its ugliness, slowness and overall lack of diverse use cases. It’s funny because I have exactly the opposite experience. I know people who used the Minitel professionally to order components until it was decommissioned well past after the introduction of an equivalent internet service and still complain that the UX was quicker to use.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

What's wrong with sex services? Wouldn't expect the French of all people to be a bunch of prudes.

makeitdouble 4y ago
Money. Sex services cost a lot, and French people hate costly services with a passion.

lovich 4y ago

Does the Internet not contain a vast amount of ugly design, slow pages, and sex services? That’s just a function of humanity, the medium it’s expressed through doesn’t alter that. I think that many engineers laud the minitel network because it’s a legitimately separate design from the current internet monoculture which despite its seeming diversity on the surface, has some foundational technology that everyone uses. Like did minitel require using http? Did minitel have outages once or twice a year from a main provider wiping their bgp tables? Those aren’t even sarcastic questions, I’ve only lightly learned about minitel but was fascinated because I’m under the impression that they took a different tech tree than what The Internet has

mariuolo 4y ago

Here in Italy Videotel was exactly how you describe it, plus tarot readers. But I'm surprised, Minitel and to some extent, Prestel were touted as success stories even at the time.

shermozle 4y ago

It wasn't the look and feel that was impressive, it was what you could do with it. You could book train tickets, pay bills, do most interactions with government, order from catalog retailers. This at a time when most transactions in stores were paid by cheques still! Even after the Web exploded, it took almost a decade to get even close to the ubiquity of being able to do things _ONLINE_ everywhere else. As for the sex services, I can only assume that they were wildly popular given the amount of money spent advertising 3615 ULLA on every train and bus. Given the French penchant for adultery, I expect it was quite a convenient service.

alex_duf 4y ago
>Given the French penchant for adultery I'm sorry what?

rsynnott 4y ago

There was an article in a major US publication around 2000 where the journalist mentioned that they'd recently been to Europe, and they had an amazing new thing there which was much better than the internet! It was Teletext, which was introduced in 1974 and was certainly in decline by 2000.