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That's hilarious... I've never heard of the Minitel used in the contest of a success -- for the most part, it was an absolute and catastrophic failure. Minitel

• Luc 17y ago
  It was a failure outside of France, a huge success inside. Half the country was using these dumb terminals (that were given away for free). I think framing it as 'the open and free internet won the fight against the state-controlled, for-pay, closed minitel', as sometimes happens, is one of those things that make a lot of sense in retrospect, but in its day the minitel was clearly a winner.
• alain94040 17y ago
  Define failure. In terms of user adoption, it was a huge success. Probably even higher than the Internet today. Really computer-illiterate people managed to use it. The number of services available was crazy. Most ads in the street would have a "URL", just like now with the web. It also was an early example of how free can serve as the basis for a very profitable business model. It succeeded in countries where the entire ecosystem was well thought out (and controlled, kind of like the iPhone app store). Just the terminal by itself, without the ecosystem, probably failed miserably in other countries, if they tried to export it.