[HN Gopher] Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the We... ___________________________________________________________________ Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) Author : adrian_mrd Score : 167 points Date : 2022-01-13 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org) (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org) | jackofalltrades wrote: | this episode of command line heroes talks about the minitel | (https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-7/world) | | Season 7 of the podcast is all about the first times of the web. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | (2017)! | | Bunch of discussion a year or so ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 | louissan wrote: | I remember being nearly murdered by my parents after they | received the phone bill via the (physical, paper-based in those | days :-) ) mail. The minitel promptly was locked out of reach of | the family's children .... | | still, good days. They even had games! | | 36.15 ... | jpoesen wrote: | A little too much of 3615 ZAZA perhaps? | louissan wrote: | hah I wish I could have. But... in hindsight ... no. | | Teenage wet fantasies and all that :-) | thamer wrote: | For context for "36.15": you would access Minitel services by | typing a numeric code followed by a short textual name, the | most common code being 3615. | | Advertisements for Minitel services would say something like | "Dial 3615 HOTSTUFF to meet a passionate lover". A _lot_ of | these services were adult chat, games, or extremely low-res | porn, and it was easy to rack up a massive phone bill by | connecting to them (you 'd have to remember to disconnect, | too!). Another very common use cases was phone book lookups. | | Think of it as a physical terminal for a ncurses-style terminal | app using a remote client, with the display updating line by | line with a scanning cursor as you received data. There's an | example of what that looked like in this short documentary | about Minitel: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s - every | single page loaded line by line that way. | maxired wrote: | I remember ads in Video Game magazine claiming you could get free | video games. You would actually pay by dialing 1 Hour or so on a | very expensive service. | jacquesm wrote: | If anything it was so far ahead of the early web that it hindered | adoption of the WWW in France. It was incredibly good and rich, | many services that could be used by non-technical people and had | a built in monetization system for information providers. It took | at least until 1996 before the web could compete and by that time | France reluctantly started to let go of their beloved tiny | terminals. It took until 2012 (!!) before it was finally | decommissioned, but by then there really wasn't much left of it | to be turned off. | agumonkey wrote: | I still think it's better for the average people. It's also | frugal oriented. You won't have youtube or google maps but for | simple searches or orders I think it was peak. Just give it a | speed bump and you're good. | jacquesm wrote: | Zero eye candy, and 1KB pages. Imagine how fast those would | load on today's hardware. | agumonkey wrote: | all solar powered on an esp32 thingie | champtar wrote: | 8 colors is plenty eye candy :) | fmajid wrote: | Not really. I worked for France Telecom's Wanadoo ISP division | and the Minitel guys tried to sabotage us at every opportunity, | including getting the head of our first division CEO Roger | Courtois, but they did not manage to slow the progress, even | though at the time they had $1B/year in revenues. The bigger | hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, | Netherlands or Germany. | | Fun story: at the time TCP/IP did not ship standard with | Windows, so we had to ship CD-ROMs with installers for WinSock, | along with a browser (initially Netscape, then IE because it | had much better provisioning tools, not because of Microsoft's | dirty tricks though they certainly tried). My colleague who was | responsible for this was clearly so traumatized he shortly | later left the company and joined the Catholic priesthood... | Voloskaya wrote: | > The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration | compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany. | | Wasn't that, in part, due to the fact that many people in | France already had a Minitel at home? | trasz wrote: | In pre-internet times the purpose of a PC was quite | different from electronic communication, so I'd guess | people ought to have them anyway... It's a good question, | though, why was that. | miniwark wrote: | It's only partly true, many people indeed have a Minitel at | home, because it was free to have one (like it was free to | have a landline phone). You only had to pay for the usage. | And there was great services not yet available on WWW : | find the train timetable, find the phone number of someone, | chat with a (fake) sexy girl... | | As for the PC penetration, there was many, but most of them | where not ready for network usage : Commodore, Amstrad, | Amiga, Thomson and first generation IBM-PC with MS-DOS. | Only the last Amiga, Macintosh and IBM compatibles had the | software to use a modem (Thomson had included a Minitel as | dual bot in some of their computer instead). | | There was no need for internet or to change the computer | when WordPerfect, Multiplan and games still work perfectly. | At the time, the pricey computer than you bought in the | 80's was still good enough in the 90's... | | I think than what had incite people to get a computer with | modem is not WWW but email (with was not a Minitel | feature). The real thing than Minitel hindred in France are | Bulletin Board Systems. They where never really a thing in | France. | | For the curious, there are still a few unofficial Minitel | services available : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro- | serveur_Minitel All you need is a Raspberry Pi and a | modified Minitel... | 123pie123 wrote: | MS Windows 3.11 came with TCP/IP winsocks, MS Windows 3.1 | didn't | | but that was the same for all countries | | I had the painful job of getting Windows running with netware | ie IPX also with TCP/IP | karmakaze wrote: | I remember those days, travelling with a Win 3.1 laptop and | a PPP stack with Winsock.dll to use dial-up in various | countries. And 1-1 direct text chat apps. | cm2187 wrote: | And it solved a problem I'd argue the internet hasn't solved | yet: how to charge users securely, easily and for small | amounts. The way it did that is through your phone bill, since | the minitel was using your phone line. No credit card number to | enter (and be hacked), no credentials to enter. Of course it | also meant kids had access to it... | 908B64B197 wrote: | > many services that could be used by non-technical people and | had a built in monetization system for information providers | | There's still a Minitel today: it's the Apple ecosystem. | | Minitel demonstrated regular people were willing to buy | services on a machine (phone, phone-like terminal, computer) | and use it as part of their normal lives. | elzbardico wrote: | Why singleout apple, when our lives are surrounded by digital | subscriptions from a lot of other companies too? Office, | Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze etc, etc... | 908B64B197 wrote: | Because the Minitel was completely vertivally integrated. | | The terminals, software it ran (as the "OS"), Network and | billing were all handled by one entity. And only this | entity could approve software for distribution. It was a | completely centralized walled garden. | | Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze can | all run anywhere, and on platforms such as Windows are free | to do their own distribution. | trasz wrote: | Because Apple has an ecosystem, whereas the others you | mentioned live within someone else's ecosystems. | jbkiv wrote: | I was inspired by the Minitel to start Esurance in 1997. The | Minitel of course had porn (more Craigslist type "offerings" | from real people) but also reservations, travel, | and...INSURANCE! You are totally correct, it was so efficient | that it delayed the adoption of the worldwide web. Of course | France wanted something in FRENCH (!). As I was raising money | in Europe for Esurance, the French executives would look down | on me and say "we have the Minitel, we want nothing to do with | your Internet" :-) | elvis70 wrote: | In the 1989 song Goodbye Marylou, Michel Polnareff evokes | sentimental relationships via Minitel. | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxGLcJgpcEg | josefrichter wrote: | Is there a place in France, probably a technical museum, where | one can still try functional Minitel terminal? Or maybe an online | "demo"? | vmception wrote: | Protip: this is where we are at with Web3 right now. | | People are excited because they can build, any state you see is | not the end all be all, and can be changed... by you! It's also | very lucrative, more than FAANG while using a simpler stack to | deploy a product, so that will keep attracting builders and their | networks. | FiddlerClamp wrote: | Traveling through Paris in 1989 I met a guy who had a terminal at | his place, and explained to me what a boon it was for gay guys to | meet up with each other, socialize, and make friends. I have no | doubt that gay men partly drove Minitel adoption (along with | other technologies like group phone chat lines, dating apps, and | so on). | bernardlunn wrote: | And in UK we had Prestel, also ahead of its time but run by a | telco and disrupted by the PC. I woz there, said the old Geezer | yodsanklai wrote: | I have fond memories of Minitel. I remember chatting with other | kids on forums when I was about 10 years old. It was really the | web before the web. The only issue was that it was incredibly | expensive (except for a few services). But it was revolutionary | in the sense that within a couple of years, almost every family | had one and became connected. | | Overall, it was a much faster adoption than internet: it wasn't | until the smartphone that everybody was online, before that lots | of families didn't have the mean or the skills to operate a | computer. Not mentioning that Windows was such a mess. My father | bought a PC which became so slow that he couldn't even use it | anymore. | smm11 wrote: | Another one of these things that could have steered us all a | different way, if only. | markharper wrote: | Notably a core plot device in the French Home Alone style film | Deadly Games (aka Dial Code Santa). | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Games_(film) | dmix wrote: | The trailer is like a Bizarro world Home Alone | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096741/ | | Now I'm curious if the Home Alone screenwriter watched it. | elvis70 wrote: | John Hughes watched it at the festival of Cannes in 1989, | after this article (in French): | https://www.bfmtv.com/people/3615-code-pere-noel-le-film- | fra... | dmix wrote: | This has always been a great business idea. Watch good | foreign films and spin them into Americanized versions then | pitch them to Hollywood. | | Also I find it amusing that Home Alone in France is titled | "Mom, I missed the plane" | elvis70 wrote: | At least, Rene Manzor was eventually hired by Amblin. | bertil wrote: | I'm surprised how little the histories of the web include the | contribution of the French tech sector for DSL, the technology | that made computer networks easy to expand to every house, and | the general idea that the Internet could be a domestic | technology. Until the late 80s, the Internet was a military and | gradually academic tool, but even until the mid-90s, having an | internet connection at home was quaint outside of France where | accessing your official records, buying certain things online was | a convenient reality. TCP/IP and Tier 1 networks were only one | half of the story, and the far smaller, easier half: connecting | every country is a matter of a few big projects; connecting | everyone is something, that to this day, many still struggle | with. | | There's an occasional mention of Cepremades as an inspiration for | the Internet Protocol, some technicality about Alohanet, but | never a history of why that should be in everyone's living room, | except a mysterious prescient and unhelpful AOL, their | omnipresent CD, and nothing about the government-sponsored, | centralised project to make cheap modulator-demodulator use long | copper wires -- something that proved both incredibly difficult | and relevant. | JPLeRouzic wrote: | > _I'm surprised how little the histories of the web include | the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL_ | | Do you mean for digital technologies or for specifically DSL? | As I remember up to 1996 there was no commercial DSL in France, | but there were excellent ISDN coverage (with rate up to | 128kbits/sec with two channels). However it was quite expensive | and when DSL was commercialized in France, it was cheaper at | the basic rate of 512Kbits/sec. ISDN commercialization started | around 1988 in France. In 1996 the Network part of FT started | to think how to open the network to higher bandwidth, and it | was not so easy because the internal backbone was built on ATM | as it was used by Minitel users. Some years later (2002?) with | declining Minitel revenues, FT decided to give the priority to | DSL, with an adequate IP backbone. | | (Source: It's only from my memories, I was involved in Rennes' | 1987 ISDN experiment, network organization in 96-98 and | commercialization of ISDN and later DSL, in Brittany, from 1998 | to 2002) | p_l wrote: | regarding ATM and DSL - A lot of setups in Europe apparently | used PPPoA, not PPPoE, meaning your DSL line integrated | easily with the ATM network on the backbone from my | understanding. | JPLeRouzic wrote: | Thanks, In France it started with PPPoA, yet quickly it | moved to PPPoE (~1999). People indeed used PCs not minitels | to connect to the new thing of the time (Internet). At the | time there was a need to update PCs as most individual or | family customers had Windows 98. My experience is that it | added instabilities to PC with Win98 where if I remember | correctly PPPoE worked out of the box with Win2K and WinXP | (it's was a long time ago). Anyway most home PCs of the | time where not to able to deal with the speed of ADSL. I | remember that the owner of a restaurant in Rennes wanted us | to pay them a new PC! | [deleted] | Cupertino95014 wrote: | The Minitel was pretty nice. I saw one in 1989 on a trip to | Paris. | | An important fact hinted at below is: you got the bill as part of | your monthly phone bill. | | Probably the most common use, not all that interesting to us, was | replacing 411 (remember that? I don't think that was the | Information number in France.) | | Besides porn, it also had online dating. | linschn wrote: | The number was 12. It was discontinued in the early 2000 IIRC. | You would call, get a human operator and could make complex | queries like get the number of somebody you knew the sound of | the name (but not the exact way of writing it) in a town or | around a specific area, and the operator would help you find | the number. | | Also in France, 15 is medical services, 17 is the police and 18 | are the firefighters. By calling 112 anywhere in Europe you'll | get an English speaking operator that can dispatch any | emergency service. | rbanffy wrote: | > it also had online dating. | | In Brazil (Sao Paulo) we had a similar, Minitel-based, system. | No online dating, but I met my first wife in a chatroom. It | also had banking and you could transfer money to different | banks with it. Initially I got an MSX computer with a modem (at | that time the telco rented out the computer instead of a | dedicated terminal for a ridiculously low fee), which was also | useful for connecting to local BBSs. | | Later on I gave the MSX back (should never have done that - it | was an unremarkable computer, but a pretty good videogame) and | added a V.23 modem to my Apple II+ clone. The system continued | to evolve, started accepting 1200 and 2400 bps inbound | connections (which made it more accessible, because V.23 modems | were not easy to come by). Last time I used it was with Windows | 95 and its terminal software. | | Legend says the system ran on Multics on a Honeywell-Bull | mainframe, making me an actual Multics user. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | A friend showed me Minitel in 1994, and I was half-surprised, | half-not-surprised that even on this entirely text-based system, | there was still porn (or at least, "visual erotica"). Human | nature, eh? | fabrice_d wrote: | The so-called "Minitel Rose" (all the erotica chat services) | services were a cash cow for France Telecom, bringing in | billions every year. | | Xavier Niel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel) started | his empire with a sex oriented chat service. | whiplash451 wrote: | Billions might be a little oversized. | fabrice_d wrote: | According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel : | | In 1998, Minitel generated EUR832 million ($1,121 million) | of revenue, of which EUR521 million was channelled by | France Telecom to service providers. | linschn wrote: | It's close if you count it in francs, and include all | services. This article [0] says that France Telecome gave | 700 M FRF to the operators, which means that 1,050 M FRF | were collected in 1986 alone. | | [0] | | https://www.nouvelobs.com/tech/20170804.OBS3007/l-age-d- | or-d... | mastazi wrote: | In Italy, the same service was called Videotel[0] and the | terminals were sold by the state-owned phone company, Sip. there | was a model where the keyboard would slide out from under the CRT | screen[1], and another model where the hinged keyboard would fold | onto the screen (similar to a laptop keyboard)[2]. | | I remember in my area some pubs had these, they were on the | tables and you could use them while you were there, it was the | first time in my life that I was chatting with someone on the | other side of the globe. (I had tried visiting some of the | popular BBS on my Amiga to look at cool stuff but had never | actually exchanged messages with anyone online). It was cool | because you could talk to perfect strangers but sometimes the | discussion would go deep. I remember I was so excited about it | and my friends were too. I think in the modern Internet we don't | really have something like that. | | [0] (Italian Wikipedia) - https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel | | [1] (picture) | https://forum.telefonino.net/images_fotodb/pict001494862_7_1... | | [2] (picture) | https://i.ebayimg.com/00/z/3UcAAOSwT5RdB2AU/$_59.JPG | athenot wrote: | It ran on V.23, which was 1200 bits/s down and 75 bits/s up, but | could be reversed in case one wanted to upload / type stuff. | | Once modems were widespread, it was a lot better to use Minitel | emulators on a computer, as one could record and replay sessions | after disconnection--a key aspect since most Minitel numbers were | billed at premium rates, to allow services to be monetized. | | </memories> | aero-glide2 wrote: | Read about this in Computer networking : a top down approach, | fascinating story. | ulkesh wrote: | I currently work for the person who helped start US Videotel and | I still haven't scratched much of the surface about all of it | with him. Everything about Minitel and US Videotel reminds me of | what was depicted in seasons 2 and 3 of _Halt and Catch Fire_. I | always wondered if Minitel was their inspiration for the Mutiny | software. | ubermonkey wrote: | I remember being shown the minitel in the early 90s, and being | AMAZED. | jgrahamc wrote: | I own two Minitels. I made a connector | (https://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361) that allows me to use one as a | serial terminal and it works nicely with a Raspberry Pi/stty. I | am in the process of writing my own firmware for the other one. | | One of my Minitels acting as a terminal over a serial cable I | made... displaying jgc.org via Lynx: https://imgur.com/a/ecmvfMj | LargoLasskhyfv wrote: | Hm. Seems like just another implementation of | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex to me. Which I didn't like | that much because of the german | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext , which reminded me | of the stuff you could get on TV, like this | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext | | Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice, the german | always seemed scammy, somehow. | dboreham wrote: | The key difference is that every household in France was | provided with a Minitel terminal, on the theory that this would | be lower cost than printing phone books. So adoption was high. | nbuet wrote: | Very different. It was really a query/answer based system with | built in monetization. You want to check credit of a company, | find someone is an obscure directory, talk with some 1996 | onlyFan chick? Minitel could do. Also, online MMORPG (check car | crash). | masklinn wrote: | > Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice | | It was highly pushed by the national telco. The telco lent | terminals for free so they were easily available, and there | were tons of useful services, especially but not only from | national companies: starting from the 80s you had stocks, | online shopping, travel reservations, information services, | message boards, databases[0], games, dating sites, ... | | Monetisation / payment was integrated from the start, through | the phone bill: just like premium-rate phone numbers, minitel | had premium-rate services (both first and third party), so you | could make money out of valuable services. It was nothing | compared to the modern web (~25000 services and about $1bn | revenue at its height), but for the mid-80s to mid-90s and out | of a population of 60m it was quite massive. | | [0] trying to get rid of phonebooks was a big reason for | minitel in the first place | fmajid wrote: | Remember, at the time the Telco was a government department | in a country that firmly believes in industrial policy. | | De Gaulle had neglected the country's phone network and it | was in a piteous state by the 1960s. A popular comedy sketch, | "Le 22 a Asnieres" by Fernand Raynaud had the hapless | protagonist trying to call number 22 at Asnieres and it was | such an ordeal he only managed to get connected by a | telephone operator in New York... | | During the 70s, specially under the technocratic president | Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the French government invested | massively to catch up and for several years the Directorate- | General of Telecommunications was the single largest | government department by budget. They bet massively on | digital switching and created huge telco gear vendors in | Alcatel. Towards the end of the 70s that massive surge of | investment had started to dwindle and the government was | trying to figure out what could be the next wave to foster | the telecommunications equipment industry, and Minitel was | the answer. | | It didn't export well. There was a trial in the US with US | West, but it didn't pan out. My former boss Jean Lebrun was | one of the key people on the electronic phone directory | project, and at the time it was the largest real-time | database in the world. It was essentially a distributed in- | memory database build on 1980s computer technology, and as | you can imagine very expensive. Fun story: Oracle tried to | get them to evaluate their RDBMS for the project, and even | gave them access to the source code, but it was found to be | inadequate. | miki123211 wrote: | Let's not forget that Minitel couldn't be as great as it was if | not for its complete and utter centralization. | | Sometimes having twenty slightly different services that are | blocked from interoperating for the sake of some abstract notion | of privacy isn't that great after all. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | Minitel was probably subject to substantial government | regulation, unlike the "tech" companies that dominate the web | and overinfluence the internet. Minitel was probably funded at | least in part through taxation. | | Certainly, Minitel was not a secretive Silicon Valley-styled | company with dual class shares or other entrenching governance | structures, that allow for concentration of voting power in the | hands of company insiders, through disproportionate allocation | of voting rights among shareholders. | | It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that | Amercians do. | | Regardless of the public opinion toward telecom, it has | historically been subject to far more regulation than so-called | "tech" companies operating websites. Sadly, some of today's | telecom companies try to emulate or piggyback on the privacy | violating behaviour of "Big Tech". | | Centralisation/decentralisation is an interesting debate, but | if the issue is privacy then, IMO, one also needs to consider | the question of regulation/deregulation. | | Perhaps Minitel was an example of a regulated, government- | supported public computer networking service that worked very | well. | | Silicon Valley and its charlatan ideology is a privacy | disaster. It is probably a threat to the survival of democratic | societies as we know them. | LeanderK wrote: | > for the sake of some abstract notion of privacy isn't that | great after all. | | For some this is not some abstract notion but a real worry. I | am glad the internet started decentralised. | pkaye wrote: | I remember back in the late 80s the SF BART stations used to have | terminals for something similar to Minitel. It had crude color | vector graphics and a menu based system. A little sluggish to | since it was probably using modems. Mainly just BART and local | information. I used to play with them while waiting for trains | with my family. | EGreg wrote: | To me, the Web and VOIP are two great examples of open, | permissionless, decentralized plaforms totally disrupting | centralized services of the day, and hugely boosting the cost and | effectiveness of publishing and telecommunications. | | And why I believe Web2 should have something like Wordpress to | take on Big Tech. | | And why I think Web3 should move past grift and peer to peer | protocols, and to applications to holistivally serve entire | communities. (https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf) | | PS: I have put my money where my mouth is and built exactly this, | over 10 years with no VC funding, and it's profitable. Qbix for | Web2 and Intercoin for Web3 https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf | legulere wrote: | In Germany we had something similar called BTX that included | online banking in 1981: | https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/business/high-technology-... | doe88 wrote: | At this point, Minitel has become kind of _Rorschachtest_ for | france, some see forward engineering, some see decline, some | bureaucracy... What 's great, is one can project almost anything | on it. | | _(disclosure, i 'm french)_ | dang wrote: | Some past related threads (if anyone's curious): | | _Minitel_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 - Oct | 2021 (2 comments) | | _Old School Minitel Laptop: 7 Steps (With Pictures) - | Instructables_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 - | Oct 2021 (1 comment) | | _Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 - Oct 2021 (3 | comments) | | _The Rise and Fall of Minitel_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 - Dec 2020 (23 | comments) | | _Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 - Sept 2020 (196 | comments) | | _Log on Like It's 1985: A Fragment of Minitel Returns_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 - Dec 2018 (9 | comments) | | _Minitel - The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure | [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 - Jan | 2018 (67 comments) | | _Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 - Oct 2017 (15 | comments) | | _Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 - July 2017 (107 | comments) | | _Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 - June 2017 (53 | comments) | | _Minitel, France 's precursor to the Web, to go dark 30/6/12_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 - June 2012 (32 | comments) | | _Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 - June 2012 (21 | comments) | | _How France fell out of love with Minitel_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 - June 2012 (1 | comment) | | _France 's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, | and B2B_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 - July | 2011 (46 comments) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-13 23:00 UTC)