[HN Gopher] The Minitel system in France (1988)
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The Minitel system in France (1988)
Author : doener
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-07-19 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fermatslibrary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fermatslibrary.com)
| dang wrote:
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| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Could someone explain how Minitel apps worked in detail, or
| provide a link? I understand it's based on duplex serial
| communication over modem, yet isn't tty-like (not every keystroke
| is transferred) but then how does the terminal know at which
| point to expect/enable input fields, etc? Is it similar to 3270?
| meatsock wrote:
| here is a blog post [1] that links to a terminfo file [2]
| written by Alexandre Montaron that might help. [1]:
| https://chapelierfou.org/blog/a-minitel-as-a-linux-terminal....
| [2]: https://chapelierfou.org/files/mntl.ti
| xcambar wrote:
| 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.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| 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.
| enqk wrote:
| 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
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| "Je ferai plus 36 15 ULLA"
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Vachement beaucoup!
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 voila!
|
| 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
| navaati wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| I was a kid/teenager at the time and I was forbidden from even
| touching the thing because it was so expensive to use.
| krallja wrote:
| There's a Platform Studies book about Minitel, "Minitel: Welcome
| to the Internet." I haven't read it yet, but so far I have a
| more-than-half rate of enjoying Platform Studies books, so I'm
| hoping.
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