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

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

by abixb • 6 years ago

353 196 6 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

aphroz2• 6 years ago

They missed the occasion to have built something global that would probably have carried European values. Probably because of a lack of communication outside french language. If I remember correctly all the parts where build in France. Later they could also have competed against YouTube, with one of the first video sharing websites, too bad they totally gave up against the US brands.

nl• 6 years ago

You'd need to explain why it would have won against the internet when AOL/MSN/CompuServe didn't.

aphroz2• 6 years ago

They missed the opportunity as well, a lot did. I am not saying they would have succeeded for any specific reasons, but back then all the possibilities were there. Internet has become a nightmare, we lost everything that made it special when it started. Nowadays probably 90% of the non-porn traffic is going to Google, Amazon or Facebook and it becomes a problem for freedom of speech and "democracy". Concentration of such power or money is a problem.

phh• 6 years ago

Compared to the internet, the Minitel lacked infrastructure:

The Minitel was inherently Peer-To-Peer but only one peer at a time.

philprx15• 6 years ago

Sorry, I find that statement quite imprecise: you could connect to a single server at a time, just like a browser tab connects you to only one service at a time (even if it uses many libraries from many other http servers), so if you mean peer to peer this way, then yes.

But then to do that, it connected to a massive infrastructure that was there and running with very high availability constraints, ... for the time ;-)

johnchristopher• 6 years ago

I remember my stepdad talking about “miditel“, which would have been the name of Minitel in Belgium. Don't know if France and Belgium were supposed to be connected, if it was the same network and operating entity or some kind of white mark thing. Or just speculation.

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

I really doubt it would have won against the internet, but there's definitely a parallel universe in which the internet was preceded by a global (or at least pseudo-global) Minitel.

Symbiote• 6 years ago

The WWW was invented at CERN, and perhaps has academic values (linking/citing).

I don't know what European values you could mean though. Business websites that close for lunch? :)

AshamedCaptain• 6 years ago

French language might have actually got you further ahead in 40 years ago Europe than any other lang. Minitel arrived in some form or another in most European countries surrounding France. Spanish version was called Ibertexto.

08234987234987210• 6 years ago

English is currently overwhelming in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_in_the_Eurov...

but 40 years ago it would've been 3 dutch and 7 english to 11 french.

andrewstuart• 6 years ago

And if you want to own a Minitel terminal, eBay France is loaded with them and they're beautiful and dirt cheap:

https://www.ebay.fr/sch/i.html?_nkw=minitel

philprx15• 6 years ago

And you can use some of them as a serial console using a simple TTL to serial voltage adapter.

The following are compatible with 80 columns:

Minitel 1B

Minitel 2

And type the following after power on to switch to 80 cols:

Function T+E

MayeulC2• 6 years ago

I bought one some time ago, I'm still planning to put a Pi zero W or something similar inside, but never got around to do so.

outadoc• 6 years ago

I bought one last year and it's honestly pretty fun to get them to work and display a Linux tty. I'll try to get some home automation stuff running on it if I can.

PeterStuer• 6 years ago

Minitel was great for it's time, but its huge success in France resulted in the country later being slower than other European countries to adopt the WWW.

nowahe• 6 years ago

We have a saying in France about the minitel. It first put us 20 years ahead of everyone, and then 20 years behind

agumonkey4• 6 years ago

Probably a common issue with tech choices.

Jugurtha• 6 years ago

I would love a Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber book on this. Something like "Le défi américain".

aembleton• 6 years ago

Bill Gates writes about this in one of his books. Not about Minitel, but other technological first movers. His example was how the US first got television but then were stuck with fewer lines per frame than we had in Europe.

First mover isn't always an advantageous position to be in.

maaaaattttt• 6 years ago

It's true. Though it must be noted that infrastructure wise France has caught up pretty nicely [0]. I think in terms of the country adopting the web for it's everyday life, like administrative procedures, it's still far behind other countries. It would be nice if there were some quantitative values out there to be able to compare objectively.

[0] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

m_t• 6 years ago

I feel infrastructure in France, at least for the consumer, is pretty good.

I had proper 100Mbits/s fiber in Paris 10 years ago and I still can't get that in my part of London.

fabiensanglard• 6 years ago

What a missed opportunity. I remember when we got a free minitel from the post office when I was a kid.

It was so expensive to use it that I was barred from even touching it. The only time I used it was many many years later, to check the result of the ceremonious baccalaureat high school exam.

It was slow and had ugly graphics compared to the VGA of my 386 but it still felt magical.

philprx15• 6 years ago

Well the popular and expensive services were advertised according to their access code: 3615.

But the less known nerd services were found on much less expensive 3614 access code such as RTEL, Privilege, QBBS, ...

Even some hackish servers where on the super cheap 3613 or free 3605s.

08234987234987210• 6 years ago

a Mastodon/3615 Ulla mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVY8MxPhxF8

I note that the anglophone vorticist magazine Blast[1], No 1 (1914) p.27, blesses france for its mastery of "rose" services.

An irony of the Minitel:

"... à l’époque, les femmes à qui je racontais que j’étais donc payé pour faire fantasmer des hommes ... étaient plutôt séduites par ma façon de le faire ... paradoxalement, parler de mon boulot d’animatrice minitel rose était une super technique de drague."[2]

[1] https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf

[2] http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2...

anthk15• 6 years ago

Did you have free Unix terminals over 3605? I'm curious. Having a remote Unix account for free over minitel would be a godsend.

agumonkey4• 6 years ago

still felt magical.

this century's quest

jtokoph• 6 years ago

Here is the Computer Chronicles coverage of minitel: https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186

WhoIsSatoshi2• 6 years ago

A briefer look at the service, in english, including current amateur maintained server https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g

philprx15• 6 years ago

The failure of Minitel lies mainly in the underlying networking model, and resulting capability to become a service provider.

Minitel was based on x25. Contrary to IP, x25 was a network where the terminals are dumb and the network needs to be smart.

This means that there was an incredibly (for the time) steep learning curve to transition from a Minitel user to a Minitel provider.

This meant that the technology could not be easily studied and tested in a garage (even if some like me did), not impossible but tougher than with IP.

You know the rest of the story.

There are also more minor factors that lead to fall of Minitel but mainly it was IMHO a closed vs. open model root cause.

I was heavily into both service and tech of Minitel at that time, AMA.

JPLeRouzic• 6 years ago

x25 was a network where the terminals are dumb and the network needs to be smart.

At the time that was a common statement, but I fail to see why X25 mandates dumb terminals.

However a profound difference was that X25 used streams whereas TCP uses packets. A stream is akin to a TCP socket.

It is a fundamental difference that stems from the fact that a X25 data exchange is safe from errors.

https://farsite.com/X.25/X.25_info/X.25.htm

philprx15• 6 years ago

It’s true that most applications were stream oriented, and Minitel was, as the users’ sessions were only bytes (in videotex encoding) rendered by the Minitel as a serial terminal integrating a modem (1200 bauds reception, 75 bauds emission!).

There was a smart gateway node that translated complex x25 from the Minitel service providers nodes into simple bidirectional stream of bytes to the Minitels, it was a specialized type of packet asssembler disassembled (PAD) called a PAD Videotex (PAVI).

Now x25 did have packets, Minitel terminals did not. So the PAVI and x25 servers were working very differently and with more complexity (hence smart) than Minitel serial terminals (hence dumb).

It’s not that x25 mandated dumb terminals.

rjsw• 6 years ago

OSI could run over X.25. As you say, it doesn't mandate dumb terminals. I worked for a couple of startups that ran services over X.25.

One road not taken could have been to define a structured document format in ASN.1 that would be displayed by the terminal.

eternalban• 6 years ago

You are confusing connection-oriented phase of x.25 with “streams”.

X.25 is a “packet-switched” “connection-oriented” protocol.

[which p.s. makes sense for traditional telecom’s view of the world, which as you know is circuit-switched. One of the main beefs of telcos in regards to IP was traffic management. Compare X.25 congestion management with IP. ]

Some kind soul has delved into the details of modalities of networking protocols:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/43543284

C1sc0cat4• 6 years ago

I think its more correct to say x.25 was virtual circuit based - over a packet based system.

x.25 had a MFT (Metric Fuck Ton) of error checking (at each layer). I used to work in OSI based networking - debugging OSI issues was an art - no wireshark back then

However You could do some cool things with osi based networking binary attachments natively supported, years before the internet had it.

Interworking between legacy system like Telex, I used to have my own telex number and answerback and could have had an x.400 email address at the country level.

Ps id take site you linked with pinch of salt no mention of PAD's for example.

jillesvangurp4• 6 years ago

The failure lies in the ownership model: a telco company trying to build a walled garden. Other walled gardens failed as well of course including some that were basically much more competitive in terms of networking. E.g. AOL failed a few years later because the world outside their walled garden was more interesting. It never really stood a chance of surviving despite being much more similar to the internet at that time.

Operators trying to build walled gardens is a pattern that repeated itself until it became such a low margin business that the only operators able to make a profit were those merely offering full internet over 3G and 4G and not even bothering with the black hole of R&D needed to keep up with what was happening elsewhere. There were attempts in both standards to grandfather in a lot of stuff that is now exclusively done over IP but none of it ended up being popular. The history of mobile phone operators is just a long succession of attempts to copy things from the internet at the time and trying to turn them into walled garden things. Each of those things failed. We're not watching TV via operator provided services. We're not doing video calls via operator provided services, their game portals have long died and faded away. We're not browsing any WAP sites. Instagram wiped out what little adoption MMS ever had. None of it stood a chance.

The incentives and ownership were just wrong and the role as operators as essential middlemen just never panned out in the real world as they hoped.

Many telcos of course managed to convert themselves into successful mobile operators ultimately but their role was diminished to providing network access. My android phone has a phone stack. The only stuff that comes in via my phone number is basically recruiter cold calls. It's a small internet device with some quaint legacy features that I rarely use. Really, numeric identifiers that you have to punch in? In 2020? How is that still a thing? I remember memorizing shit like that a few decades ago.

So, minitel is merely an early and probably expensive incarnation of that. France telecom subsidized the devices and had to earn it back via regular network charges. I doubt that generated anywhere near what they hoped in revenue.

philprx15• 6 years ago

Absolutely all true, these notions actually share the same model: centrally controlled, no control at terminal / no open access for new entrants, consumption devices are locked to consume only, hard to “become center” or provider, etc. The networking model was a logical consequence (and practical implementation) of the the centrally controlled walled garden you describe.

Many hackers were trying to escape it by becoming their own providers and also connecting with other international x25 servers and foreign hackers. For example, Assange was actually from these times.

Nevertheless, it did generate much more revenue than what they initially envisioned.

dnpp123• 6 years ago

Operators trying to build walled gardens is a pattern that repeated itself until

Dedicated private companies (myspace, facebook, gmail, etc...) started building walled gardens.

Dahoon• 6 years ago

My android phone has a phone stack. The only stuff that comes in via my phone number is basically recruiter cold calls. It's a small internet device with some quaint legacy features that I rarely use.

Funny how people live in totally different bubbles. I see you are based in Berlin (I'm in Denmark) and I have no idea how it is there but here I -as a geek with very geeky friends- don't know anyone who use their phone as you describe. Sure a few calls are via Facebook with video and some messages too (though many are starting to refuse to use social media) but the overwhelming majority of use is normal old phone-calls, SMS and MMS. Inside my bubble things like you describe (internet based stuff) is where "old people" have moved and younger people are moving away from. Especially those who hate all the data mining done by Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. I don't have a single app on my phone with those capabilities you use and I'm not missing out. Of course I'm sure other very different bubbles are right next door :-)

Operators trying to build walled gardens is a pattern that repeated itself

Apple, Facebook...

anthk15• 6 years ago

TCP/IP can work over AX25, hamradio users know it well.

dfox• 6 years ago

AX.25 is to a large extent completely different beast than what people mean when they talk about "X.25 network". X.25 as a specification is to a large extent an "API" and not particular network implementation. AX.25 is complete protocol stack that implements network with superficially similar and heavily simplified API.

rbanffy2• 6 years ago

The failure of Minitel lies mainly in the underlying networking model, and resulting capability to become a service provider.

Not sure it's that simple. While you couldn't easily host your own services on the telco mainframes, there was nothing stopping companies from offering services over the phone. We had a Minitel service where I grew up in Brazil and numerous BBSs supported the 1200/75 dial in speeds and had specific UIs (or, at least, "ASCII" art) for the terminals.

Supporting the cheap and easily available modems was a no-brainer for the BBS owners, even though they needed to do bit-banging to make the asymmetric speed work.

Think of the terminal as a primitive but ubiquitous browser and the phone system as a circuit switched network and the dial in services as websites and you have the 80's web.

conradfr• 6 years ago

I'm not sure it can be described as a failure, it made a lot of money and provided many jobs in France (I think my father worked on it during the 80s as a telco engineer).

The last time I had to use it must have been in 1999 as the only choice to enter your college preferences. And there was "Minitel over the internet" for some time. Apparently it only closed in 2012!

Transitioning the country to the Internet was botched in a typical French fashion though.

jcmeyrignac• 6 years ago

I met my first wife thanks to the Minitel. I met my second wife thanks to the Internet.

WhoIsSatoshi2• 6 years ago

Better graphics?

agumonkey4• 6 years ago

more pop ups

rcarmo• 6 years ago

I used one of those. There was a narrow time window prior to the dial-up age when multple telcos considered something similar, but the investment required (especially terminals) was massive. It was a pretty neat universe. I last played with Minitel data when looking at (of all things) _dial-up_ set-top-boxes with a basic browser (it was an Alcatel thing, I think, that talked to a Minitel gateway to render content).

aarroyoc• 6 years ago

In Spain we had Ibertex, which is basically the same technology (some minor improvements), but it wasn't as popular as Minitel in France.

philprx15• 6 years ago

Well what made Minitel popular was that France Telecom (now Orange) gave the basic Minitel 1 for free to anyone requesting it.

That was huge at the time.

anthk15• 6 years ago

Well in Spain we were still fighting to get a flat rate internet subscription in 1998 or so.

macdice3• 6 years ago

I lived in France for a few years around the turn of the millennium and picked up a Minitel 1 cheap at a local flea market. I set it up in the living room as a GUI for a sound system controller connected to a Linux box, playing MP3s. I don't remember the details but there was something odd about the serial port... funky voltage or baud rate or something. It seemed very retro at the time... the design exuded 1970s style in some way (it had some style in common with the Poly-1 computers from my high school in New Zealand, originally released around the same year, 1981). Sadly I left it behind! The keyboard was frankly terrible. Vive l'azerty.

arthurcolle• 6 years ago

Mon gars, t'as vraiment mal ecrit `qwerty` ;)

kergonath2• 6 years ago

Sounds very interesting. I would love to read about how you did that.

macdice3• 6 years ago

I don't remember much but I see there are many articles from people who've hooked a Minitel up to a Raspberry Pi or similar in recent times. I think it had a non-standard DIN connector, and you could make up a special cable to get RS232, possibly with a voltage change, not sure about that, and then I think you just had to talk to it very slowly; maybe 1200/75 baud, something like that. There were terminfo definitions for minitel (various models) and I see they are still there in Debian, which means you can write programs using libcurses to do primitive, slow 80s style user interfaces!

cm2187• 6 years ago

Also in the early days of the internet, most dialup modems sold in France would also allow you to connect to the Minitel (rather than the internet) from your computer.

philprx15• 6 years ago

Yes, check if the modem does “V23”, it’s the 1200/75 Minitel modem connection protocol.

lqet• 6 years ago

To give some numbers:

By 1988 three million terminals were installed, with 100,000 new units installed monthly. The telephone directory received 23 million calls monthly, with 40,000 updates daily. About 6,000 other services were available, with 250 added monthly. France Télécom estimated that almost 9 million terminals—including web-enabled personal computers (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux)—had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people (of a total population of 60 million). Developed by 10,000 companies, in 1996, almost 26,000 different services were available. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

A similar (yet not nearly as successful as Minitel) service existed in Germany (BTX [1]), and I remember my uncle still using it for online banking in 2005 (it was officially shut down in 2001, but online banking continued to work until around 10 years ago). He used a special software for Windows 98 which acted as a kind of BTX browser, so for around 10 years he used BTX and the Internet in parallel, on the same machine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext

fmajid2• 6 years ago

I worked at France Télécom 1994-2000, including bringing up their ISP, Wanadoo. At the time Minitel generated $1B/year in revenue and they had clout in the organization, and risked stifling the Internet (it would have come anyway, but FT would have been left out). I can’t even recount the amount of time I had to spend explaining how web pages could not be priced on a time-spent basis like Minitel.

ArnoVW• 6 years ago

Hey Fazal, LTNC =) Before you arrived in NL I had similar issues with EuroNet management. I remember you telling me about your Java applet to access Minitel from the web. Good times.

Hope you are well. My mail is in my profile =)

ergl• 6 years ago

FYI, your email is not visible. You should put it in the "about" section of your profile.

C1sc0cat4• 6 years ago

Interesting I worked on Prestel (Uk Teletext) billing for a while as well as the Telecom Gold (Dialcom) systems and they had super complex and expensive tariffs which stopped wide uptake.

We used to joke that for Prestel you could have a custom tariff for all services almost down to the user level - People whose name is fred and own a goldfish we used to joke.

Prestel Billing use to run on a Unisys mainframe and a super niche language called LINC - and was baroque and crufty to an extreme - there was a BBC micro that sat in a corner and Bonged occasional that was part of it (exactly what I never found out)

hazeii3• 6 years ago

Hopefully not at Baynard House [0]

I was responible for, ah, certain outages at the time. Not in any malicious sense, but because my game (running on a 4Mhz Z80) managed to overload the whole network.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baynard_House,_London

hazeii3• 6 years ago

Fond memories of lugging a 4.77MHZ Compaq "laptop" [0] to and from Paris to hook a Prestel game up to Minitel via X25.

Which fits the mindset as you say, since the game was priced per-unit time and BT were coining it in on the UK side (this wasl still a few years pre-eternal September).

[0] Plasma screen, 1 16-bit ISA expansion slot and 1 8-bit, built in PSU.

chaostheory2• 6 years ago

Do you happen to have more info on the people who worked on minitel? Maybe it's because most of the source material is in French, but it would be nice if I could flesh out my page on it.

https://theymadethat.com/things/adl/minitel

fmajid2• 6 years ago

I only joined FT in 1994 and most of them had moved on. My former boss Jean Lebrun worked on the marquee phone directory application, which was at the time probably the world’s highest transaction-rate database. I believe he was also involved in the abortive effort to sell the tech to Qwest in Denver.

Most of the R&D was done by the CCETT lab in Rennes, Brittany. Well into the 90s they were advocating for a graphics-oriented protocol named VEMMI to replace videotex instead of the web. Sort of a cross between X11 and a IBM 3270 terminal conceptually. There were a lot of pitched battles between the Not-invented-here and Web standards camps at FT R&D in those days.

As for the roots of the Minitel, they are a bit more prosaic. France believes in industrial policy. When president Giscard made upgrading the phone network a national priority after years of neglect under de Gaulle, the department became the largest government department by budget. When that started to taper off in the late 70s, they needed to find a new outlet for the manufacturing capacity that had hitherto being making Alcatel E10 TDM switches, and the Minitel was that outlet. One of my 6th-grade classmates was actually part of the Vélizy trial project. The paid external provider model was the result of the press worrying FT would compete with them in information services and insisting on an open model.

Later Minitels were VT100 compatible, albeit with an atrocious keyboard. I used one as terminal to connect to my university’s Vax running Unix over a 9600 baud serial line from my dorm room. Considering it was free when a real VT100 was more expensive than a PC, that was a substantial cost engineering achievement.

agumonkey4• 6 years ago

I had no idea French Telephone network was a shame in the late 70s. At least it wasn't anymore in the 80s (or their marketing dept did magic).

Who else reused old minitels as a display here ?

tmilard• 6 years ago

I was 16 years old. It was 1986 I believe. With my twin brother we discovered the Minitel in our parents's bedroom. We spend all evenings on the minitel after class. Boy it was fun ! We had 'special' codes so we did not pay as much as adults. And we chat with Men (we pretended to a woman). We laught at every kinky sentence they made to us. It was like a writing experience. We chatted with 8 men at th ame time.

Hopefully we never told our parents aout what we were doing.. It was my first dating App experience. 10 years before having a Web connexion.

Imagine : - All french citizen had a free minitel device (like a mini computer). It was amitious for sure... - Now the only problem with State driven technological projects : Once it was delivered, Th french telecom did not continue to improve the system. Oterwise, France would have been the center of the Web I supose...

thrwaway69• 6 years ago

What do men get out of catfishing other men?

heavenlyblue• 6 years ago

I am pretty certain it’s especially fun for kids to discover what men are into so that when they finally grow up they could be better in touch with their own needs

krageon• 6 years ago

I think it's a pretty broad hobby for early teenagers and children. For me personally, I just thought it was funny. It's also interesting, because you find out very fast that there's some guys just a little too into it when you say you're a 13yo girl. That I think informs your behaviour online also. It's a consequence-free way to learn about loads of impulses other people have, without the shadow of adult oversight.

rat9988• 6 years ago

Nothing. They are just young people who make fun of others.

08234987234987210• 6 years ago

paid & laid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440393

rchaud• 6 years ago

Speaking for myself, my friends and I would do this as teens in '99 with a open protocol chat program called MIRC. This was chatting with strangers, and back then everyone opened conversations by asking "ASL?" which meant "Age, Sex, Location".

We figured out pretty early on that by saying "Female", you opened yourself up to a torrent of creepy come-ons, which to us was absolutely hilarious. Here was this complete stranger who did not have so much as a profile picture to go off of, either professing his undying love to you after a few messsages, or straight up using abusive and degrading language.

As an old millenial now, it's been pretty shocking to me how open Gen Z is about revealing numerous identifying details about themselves on social networks. I'm under 40 and we were raised to protect our privacy online, and this was when surveillance tech was in the stone ages.

sbilstein2• 6 years ago

When I was a young teen my friends and I picked female avatars on Runescape because we'd get free items from presumably male players. Sometimes you'd have to 'flirt back' but inevitably you'd get some good items, gold, and some creepy messages. As a 14 year old kid, it was hilarious to think about some sad older man flirting via Runescape gifts.

justnotworthit• 6 years ago

Poster said he was a teenager. For adolescences, everything around sexuality is interesting. Some of those men he was tricking were probably other teenagers pretending to be adults!

flashyfaffe2• 6 years ago

You're right. And to be more precise, French government at that time pushed its citizen to use the minitel:common example that come at the top of mind: when I was younger minitel was mandatory to register yourself at school or university which explains the quite important development within the country.there were even store offering minitel service. However this monopoly position were disrupted like any other monopoly by better and more advanced technology.

ekianjo3• 6 years ago

french telecom did not continue to improve the system.

Had they improved it, it would still have made it paying by the minute because they had no interest in any other business model.

BrandoElFollito• 6 years ago

Yes, I was 16 as well in 1986 and was also interested in technology, especially when it was called 3615 ULLA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fmsF6PDXwc, probably NSFW because it is horribly politically incorrect today, like most of what we had in the 80's)

On the serious side - Minitel was such an incredible experience! The only feeling similar to that was the first email I sent in 1992.

I feel it is a horribly lost opportunity to lead the web, teen like us were driving the idea a lot (I was trying to explain my parents to not take the phone book anymore becauseit was all there, a search away...)

Iv• 6 years ago

It was back when France was still "communist" and managed to make a profit out of it :-)

astrobe_• 6 years ago

All french citizen had a free minitel device (like a mini computer)

Nitpicking: AFAIR, the Minitel was not "free" but rented - just like most ISPs in France today rent an ADSL modem-router.

Also, the Minitel was not really a mini-computer but merely a screen, a keyboard and a modem in a single box. People could tell the difference with a computer, because at that time 8-bit micro-computers (Amstrad CPC, Commodore C64, ZX Sinclair, Atari ST, you name it) were not uncommon at home.

Now the only problem with State driven technological projects : Once it was delivered, Th french telecom did not continue to improve the system

Actually, they did. The French Wikipedia page [1] is much more detailed than its English language counterpart. The latest model could display JPEG black-and-white images, and spoke at 9600bps (versus 1200bps for the first gen.). But it is true it was too little too late; it could not rival the multimedia PC/Modem combo that started to be affordable for the masses at that time.

The (maybe?) too slow evolution of the tech probably had to more to do with the huge userbase and backwards compatibility issues than with "State driven tech projects" (BTW French civil nuclear power and high speed trains were for a long time "State driven tech" and are still alive and more-or-less kicking). Just like IPv4 seems to not want to die today.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

cswilly• 6 years ago

All of my Minitel terminals (2) were free from France Telecom. Living in France since 1982.

abhiminator• 6 years ago

[OP here]

Amusingly, I learned about Minitel just a few hours ago when I stumbled upon this video from John Stossel's show (obligatory thanks to YouTube algorithm) where he mentions Minitel as an exhibit of government/public sector's failure to innovate and a way for the French government to 'control the growth' of this new technology before private players. Here's the video (with the exact time stamp) where Mr. Stossel talks about Minitel -- https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208

I then searched the web (through Google) for information on Minitel and this IEEE article showed up.

kergonath2• 6 years ago

The Minitel wasn’t the Internet, though, and was in its time quite innovative. There are much better examples of strategic errors from various governments (and private companies as well, but it does not fit the same agenda).

[edit] in any case, thanks for the link. That was an interesting read.

justin66• 6 years ago

John Stossel's show (obligatory thanks to YouTube algorithm) where he mentions Minitel as an exhibit of government/public sector's failure to innovate and a way for the French government to 'control the growth' of this new technology before private players.

I wonder what he thinks ARPANET is an example of. (I don't)

hylaride• 6 years ago

I don't call myself a libertarian, but I am sympathetic to a lot of their arguments. Stossel comes across as a whiny spoiled brat who can't handle being told 'no' to doing things like lighting up a cigarette in a public school, because it's bad enough that it's a public school but I can't smoke either?

The selective arguments he makes can usually be picked apart very easily, too.

masswerk3• 6 years ago

I don't consent with the gist of that show. Rather, I think, the Minitel approach was much like todays app stores: still allowing for private entrepreneurs and innovation, but with a regulating entity, which is also claiming ownership of the transactions, on top of it.

tenbino• 6 years ago

I’d like to see a plain text browser with javascript and minitel / teletext style graphics.

Maybe it could be good for accessibility .... the concept of making modern websites into plain text just doesn’t work very well (I.e Lynx).

boudin2• 6 years ago

I do think that in term of accessibility and ease of use for some remote services the minitel was quite better than the web is. I worked for a company that ran a service until the very end of the network. This service was used to track mandatory farming informations. Farmers could use the phone, the minitel or the web to do so. There was a whole generation of farmers who used it until the very end and ended up having to use the phone as a replacement. Having to use a computer with the operating system and browser layer made the web version of the service much more complex by nature.

titilev• 6 years ago

My father used this kind of service on the minitel (maybe the one your company was running), and indeed it was quite confusing to him to switch to the web version. The later also came with much more information to process.

anthk15• 6 years ago

edbrowse supports JS thru duktape. Enough to sort comments by date on that Spanish Digg/Reddit clone.

https://edbrowse.org/

bb101• 6 years ago

"Minitel use peaked in 1993". The closest technology at that time outside France would have been bulletin board services (BBS). Each was run as a separate walled garden but many were linked by Fidonet. So not too dissimilar to Minitel, just more diverse and decentralized.

philprx15• 6 years ago

There was a similar system for minitel: these were called RTC servers. Nothing to do with WebRTC.

It was short for Réseau téléphonique commuté. Basically a simple user would run the equivalent of bbs software on his computer, but with specific tweak that it could talk in videotex encoding.

And then of course he would use a modem (even in hackish ways the modem of an existing Minitel) to answer calls on a normal phone line (no x25 here).

But these rarely did FIDO.

mytailorisrich• 6 years ago

The Minitel could be used as a modem (it had a serial port)

I remember it used with Atari ST and Amigas for online chat and file download (1200 bps download, 75 bps upload iirc)

webreac2• 6 years ago

In 1992, with a minitel 1B (80 columns), I have used the 3621 to connect to a service (129040134) that connected me to a vax station at school. From there I was connected to sun station where I edited my thesis using latex and vi. My teacher never knew I was 700km away from him when he received my daily updates.

anthk15• 6 years ago

How much did it cost?

webreac2• 6 years ago

.The minitel was free (we had to choose between having a minitel or having a paper annuary). The communication on 3615 was expensive (9.15€ per hour). On 3614 or 3621, it was around 3.05€ per hour (sometimes half).

raoulvolfoni• 6 years ago

Minitel terminals always were considered to be 'dumb' machines, as mandated by how the service worked. No storage, no graphics capabilities... However, they were running their little 8 bit microcontroler at 14 Mhz, had 32 kB of ROM... (Ok, just 128 bytes of RAM) This guy made it do things it had no business doing: http://hxc2001.free.fr/minitel/ https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo

nabla9• 6 years ago

In mid-90s Microsoft attempted the same in the US as counterattack against the web but it was already too late. Blackbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

anthk15• 6 years ago

MSN too.

mhd• 6 years ago

Germany had the same with BTX, was there anything like this at all in the US (for the public, not for army/services/proto-Bloomberg)?

Probably not, or else some people would focus more on providing an internet-ready equivalent to this than trying to make "GopherSpace" a thing.

omerhj• 6 years ago

I believe AT&T was trying to build a "videotex" system based on the NAPLPS protocol which was developed by Telidon in Canada.

BYTE Magazine's July 1983 issue was dedicated to videotex:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-07/mode/2up

raverbashing• 6 years ago

The story seems to echo a bit of why Gopher did not become the WWW (with the added protocol scalability issues that tcp/ip catered for) - basically, Gopher developers set a prohibitive pricing model (I think it was U of Minn)

frank26• 6 years ago

I recall it was the mere fact that they had a pricing model at all when the competition made it clear that they would not attempt to derive any revenue from anything related to the web (e.g., running a web server, distributing a web client program)

kuharich• 6 years ago

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405

tinus_hn2• 6 years ago

The French insisted on doing it all in French while the language of the Internet is English. They isolated themselves and could never have been the center of the web.

anthk15• 6 years ago

Back in the day, not so far from the Minitel days, French was the lingua franca of diplomacy, and spoken all over the world.

English was the language of commerce and technology, but French being the language of diplomacy and intercommunication it would be a game changer on teleco.

But Minitel was a bit like an enclosed shell, like Gopher.

Now Gopher is the opposite, nobody needs a license to host a server.

pmontra• 6 years ago

The switch was somewhere in the 70s. For every two English words I hear on TV now there was one in French and one in my language (Italian). Anyway the exposition to foreign languages was much lower because there was no Internet. English got an advantage that French never had in the 20th century. And Hollywood, UK/USA music, etc. All of them larger than their French counterparts.

ekianjo3• 6 years ago

not so far from the Minitel days, French was the lingua franca of diplomacy, and spoken all over the world.

What a ridiculous claim. The language spoken for Diplomacy is spoken by diplomats and has virtually nothing to do with what the population speaks. Just like Latin was the language of Religion and Science in Middle-Ages, but certainly not spoken by everyone else.

athriren• 6 years ago

english was not the language of the internet prior to the internet existing, which is the period of time this article is primarily concerned with.

tinus_hn2• 6 years ago

The period prior to the internet existing (before the 60s) ends far before the period before Minitel existing (before the 80s).

While you can have discussions about when it became ‘the internet’ ARPAnet was already an international network far before minitel launched and of course the language was English.

mastazi• 6 years ago

In Italy we had Videotel which was (IIRC) a localised version of Minitel built for the Italian market. I remember a pub in my neighbourhood had Videotel terminals, I thought it was exciting that you would be able to communicate with someone you didn’t know in a chat room.

grandinj• 6 years ago

Ah, Interesting memories.

I worked on Beltel for a while, which was a South African copy of the UK version of this.

As in, South Africa got a copy of the code, and developed from there.

Ran over ordinary telephone lines using mostly 2400 baud modems to a client which was normally a terminal program running on a PC.

The code itself was VAX Pascal running on a set of DEC VAX VMS boxes (5 front-end boxes, and a dual-VAX backend cluster).

UncleSlacky2• 6 years ago

Minitels were freely accessible in post offices, I recall searching for jobs on one in the local PO while on holiday there in the early 90s.

caymanjim2• 6 years ago

Back in the 1980s when I was a l33t hax0r, I used to bounce around the world on X.25 networks, many of which I suspect were operated by Minitel. There was a chat system/early BBS/something called QSD in France, where a lot of hackers would congregate to chat and trade credentials for systems. I can't find much on the net about QSD now, except a few old Phrack articles. Does anyone know what the relationship between Minitel and QSD was?

thetis• 6 years ago

Minitel is the terminal system, with the CPU, keyboard & screen, but by extension, it includes the protocol to display & download the data. Actually, i was used to connect to "minitel" servers, RTC or BBS-like that were dedicated to the developement of HP48 calculator applications. It was a very rich scene in France, with RTC servers named Pulsar, RTC-one, etc. Basic BBS boards with discussion boards (like HN!) and where you could download HP 48 programs. Some history (in french) about one of these boards http://wiz0u.free.fr/pulsar/historique.php

It was back in 1997 with a pre-internet scene, the first IRL parties, internet friends, etc Basicly it was some smart guy hosting an atari st in the garage, with a dedicated telecom line (so 1 people connected at the same time!).

doublejay1999• 6 years ago

you must be as old a me. i was regular on QSD via X25. Great Days. Big big phone bills.

QSD was a 3rd party chat service, accessed Via minitel but with a per minute surchage. I met a lot of good friends their, swapped some postcards with some french girls. Great days.

I dont know how it came to be accessible via x.25 though.

icedchai5• 6 years ago

A local BBSer introduced me to x.25 hacking probably around 1989 or 90 or so. I remember QSD and another system... Lutzifer, I think?

caymanjim2• 6 years ago

Yeah, lutzifer was another X.25 hacker chatroom. I think it was based in Germany. I used to reach it via Telenet [sic]. In retrospect, I think it may have been run by a US government intelligence agency. Someone on there doxxed me despite hopping through a lot of relays that should have been nearly impossible to trace through.

philprx15• 6 years ago

Yes, QSD was hosted on a Minitel serving node/system but was mainly used for international chats. So we can say that QSD “abused” the x25 interconnection of a Minitel server in order to provide chats mainly to hackers.

Common people there: BayernPower, Gandalf, ... long time ago.

It was 0208057... something iirc.

icedchai5• 6 years ago

I remember some dude abusing a VAX that had x.25 access to connect out to all that stuff. "SET HOST /X25", anyone? Word spread like wildfire. At one point every elite dude and his mother was on the system. I think it took a little over a month to figure out something was awry. Probably the Sprint / Telenet bill was a clue...

danw1979• 6 years ago

Another really good brief history of Minitel from the Creatures Of Thought blog -https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-fragmentat...

seapunk• 6 years ago

Before knowing the Web, I spent afternoons after the school chatting with strangers on the Minitel, instant messaging was the big thing. Seeing the popularity of the chat feature, a lot of entrepreneurs decided to launch erotic services well-known as "Minitel Rose". People essentially spent their time (and paid a fortune) to flirt with chatbots.

presspot• 6 years ago

We also tend to forget about Quantum Link, the precursor to AOL, which was also a very robust system on the Commodore 64 in the mid 80s.

maire2• 6 years ago

I seem to be repeating myself to young whippersnappers, but the web is not the same as the internet.

Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html

The internet clearly predated Minitel. The big difference is that it was not initially used for commerce. It was to link the military with universities.

I joined Xerox in 1985. Two years earlier the network we were on converted from Arpanet to Internet. There might have been some group somewhere in Xerox that was still on the Arpanet but the military were worried about security so they created the Internet. You can call the exact date of the split between arpanet and internet as being the birth of the internet.

Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college.

Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.

The web made the internet easier to use - that is true. But before then we still had email and discussion boards and distribution groups. It was all text based and somewhat ugly.

mattl2• 6 years ago

Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.

Can you give me an example of a pre-web URL?

not2b• 6 years ago

URLs were invented by Tim Berners-Lee. They do not precede the web. There were separate namespaces before the web; there was Gopher and FTP, and various shorthands to indicate the combination of a site and a path, but no standard, universal resource locator (see what I did there?).

boudin2• 6 years ago

There was an experimental network in France before the Transpaq network of the minitel that was designed for inter-connectivity. It strongly inspired TCP/IP which is, in my opinion, what actually created the Internet of today (having a world-wide network of networks). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES

I don't think the vision of the minitel was to build an international network though, so there might not have been much interest in inter-connectivity I guess.

08234987234987210• 6 years ago

https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/cwi-achievements-details

"CWI established the first connection between Europe and the Internet on November 17, 1988."

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/613/53...

"Not only were links within North America difficult to establish, but Dik Winter, from the Netherlands, describes how the first cross Atlantic Usenet link was delayed until 1982-1983 because of the difficulty of acquiring an autodialer modem that conformed to European standards. The mail link ... connected the site decvax at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the U. S. with mcvax at Mathematisch Centrum (MC) in the Netherlands."

Télétel was 1980.

a cold war poisson d'avril: https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html

gumby• 6 years ago

"CWI established the first connection between Europe and the Internet on November 17, 1988”

Not at all true; I used to connect from the Centre Mondial in Paris via transpac to MIT-Multics to read my email in 1982. And that only worked because those links already existed.

echoradio• 6 years ago

The split you talk about, did the networks become MILNet and NSFNet? I always thought Arpanet was decommissioned, not transferred to the military. Or was it just the wording that made it seem Arpanet was shut down?

Genuinely curious about Internet history details. Thank you!

frank26• 6 years ago

http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/30-years-of-tcpip-d...

snom380• 6 years ago

Does anyone know which of the "classic" minitel terminals had color displays? About the only one I've found is this on: https://sites.google.com/site/collectionminitel/equipements-...

gxqoz• 6 years ago

There's a good early episode of the Reply All podcast on Minitel: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoda

One story: They got more business use than you might otherwise expect because they didn't list what services you paid for on the bill. So businessmen were racking up larger charges for sex chatrooms and what have you without having to explain them to their company.

dang• 6 years ago

If curious see also for your Minitel needs:

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881

2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141

2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531

2012 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360

2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106

chaoticmass• 6 years ago

When I first learned about the Minitel, most things I found online just said it was done to reduce the cost of printing and shipping phone books. That never sounded right-- very interesting to hear more of the actual story.

frank26• 6 years ago

That was the consideration that persuaded the French office in charge of the telephone network to make the initial investment in Minitel.

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

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