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.
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.<p>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.<p>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...
To give some numbers:<p>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]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel</a><p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext</a>
The failure of Minitel lies mainly in the underlying networking model, and resulting capability to become a service provider.<p>Minitel was based on x25. Contrary to IP, x25 was a network where the terminals are dumb and the network needs to be smart.<p>This means that there was an incredibly (for the time) steep learning curve to transition from a Minitel user to a Minitel provider.<p>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.<p>You know the rest of the story.<p>There are also more minor factors that lead to fall of Minitel but mainly it was IMHO a closed vs. open model root cause.<p>I was heavily into both service and tech of Minitel at that time, AMA.
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.
What a missed opportunity. I remember when we got a free minitel from the post office when I was a kid.<p>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.<p>It was slow and had ugly graphics compared to the VGA of my 386 but it still felt magical.
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?
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:
<a href="http://hxc2001.free.fr/minitel/" rel="nofollow">http://hxc2001.free.fr/minitel/</a>
<a href="https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo</a>
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.
I seem to be repeating myself to young whippersnappers, but the web is not the same as the internet.<p>Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: <a href="http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html" rel="nofollow">http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college.<p>Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.<p>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.
[OP here]<p>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 -- <a href="https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208</a><p>I then searched the web (through Google) for information on Minitel and this IEEE article showed up.
And if you want to own a Minitel terminal, eBay France is loaded with them and they're beautiful and dirt cheap:<p><a href="https://www.ebay.fr/sch/i.html?_nkw=minitel" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.fr/sch/i.html?_nkw=minitel</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d like to see a plain text browser with javascript and minitel / teletext style graphics.<p>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).
There's a good early episode of the Reply All podcast on Minitel: <a href="https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoda" rel="nofollow">https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoda</a><p>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.
Here is the Computer Chronicles coverage of minitel: <a href="https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186</a>
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).
Ah, Interesting memories.<p>I worked on Beltel for a while, which was a South African copy of the UK version of this.<p>As in, South Africa got a copy of the code, and developed from there.<p>Ran over ordinary telephone lines using mostly 2400 baud modems to a client which was normally a terminal program running on a PC.<p>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).
Another really good brief history of Minitel from the Creatures Of Thought blog -<a href="https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-3-the-statists/" rel="nofollow">https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-fragmentat...</a>
"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.
Does anyone know which of the "classic" minitel terminals had color displays? About the only one I've found is this on: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/collectionminitel/equipements-terminaux/minitel-1-couleur-radiotechnique" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/collectionminitel/equipements-...</a>
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.
In mid-90s Microsoft attempted the same in the US as counterattack against the web but it was already too late. Blackbird <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)</a>
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)?<p>Probably not, or else some people would focus more on providing an internet-ready equivalent to this than trying to make "GopherSpace" a thing.
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.
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)
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).<p>Who else reused old minitels as a display here ?
Past comments: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405</a>
The Minitel could be used as a modem (it had a serial port)<p>I remember it used with Atari ST and Amigas for online chat and file download (1200 bps download, 75 bps upload iirc)
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.