Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web

by rbanffy • 9 years ago

122 15 9 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

walshemj• 9 years ago

Apart from PRESTEL which preceded Minitel I am sure Samuel Fedida would take a dim view of the IEEE not mentioining him.

IrishJourno• 9 years ago

The article notes PRESTEL, and points out the key technical difference between the PRESTEL and Minitel architectures:

"Although [Minitel] wasn’t the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service providers to operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only the network, whereas in most other countries, a single organization had centralized control of both the network and servers for the videotex system.

In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the Prestel videotex system was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General Post Office."

gavman• 9 years ago

Reply All did a great episode all about Minitel, for those interested: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/french-connection/

fottuto• 9 years ago

Proud "Videotel" owner from Italy (worked on ITAPAC x25). Same as minitel, and with some tricks you'd have QSD as well ;-)

drpgq2• 9 years ago

Interesting that at the same time I was using a C64 with 300 and 1200 baud modems to get on the local BBSs in Canada. Which was way more of a hassle.

wolco• 9 years ago

Any favourites you can remember?

drpgq2• 9 years ago

The pub won one. A few of my friends ran their own small ones that mainly just us.

grumblestumble• 9 years ago

South Africa also had Beltel around that time, a very similar service I'm sure. I remember being wowed by the real-time cross-country chat and the better-than-ANSI block shapes for drawing :)

marindez• 9 years ago

Covered many times here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minitel&sort=byPopularity&pref...

Don't forget about Infovía in Spain!

Johnythree• 9 years ago

And Viatel in Australia

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2wu5va/viatel_au...

verri• 9 years ago

It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off? There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can't find much information on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these networks?

rjsw• 9 years ago

Calling a foreign address worked fine, there was a prefix code for each network.

kuharich• 9 years ago

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561

rbanffy• 9 years ago

Not sure what other systems ran, but, AFAIK, the one in São Paulo, called Videotexto, was served out of a DPS-8M mainframe running MULTICS.

patkai• 9 years ago

I graduated from a Telecommunications technical school in Budapest in 1992. We took the exam from relay-based switching centres (also 7A2 and ARF102) and had to repair an old style rotary dial phone to pass and get a diploma. Our teacher told us about Minitel in France but emphasised that the real thing will be ISDN (64kbps). In a couple of years in college I had high speed Internet access, Silicon Graphics workstations with those beautiful, huge blue monitors. It is hard to imagine nowadays what a change that was, though switching from my Motorola flip phone to iPhone 4 was also quite something.

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web

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