
Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - ForHackernews
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/minitel/530646/?single_page=true
======
jacquesm
Minitel had one huge drawback: it was too good. It put France a solid 4 years
behind the rest of the world when the web hit. Everything in France was done
via Minitel, and in the beginning the web was still so small and capable of
much less that the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of
what they already had. But that changed rapidly and before long the head start
turned into a lag and a ton of inertia. The world had nothing to compare the
web with so that's what it moved to at an incredible clip. Roughly around
1996/1997 France saw the light and then they moved quite rapidly.

Even so it took until 2012(!) before Minitel was finally decommissioned.

~~~
mojuba
> the French (rightly) laughed at it as an inferior version of what they
> already had

What they didn't see though was that Internet was a decentralized, truly
democratic network unlike Minitel and the likes (e.g. CompuServe, AOL, Bitnet
I think?). For its time Minitel was quite good aesthetically and in terms of
UI, but as a centralized consumer-oriented network it had no chance to compete
with the Internet.

~~~
fabrice_d
It was not totally centralized technically. You could host your own full
service, using your own modem banks and servers. The drawback was that you
would not be discoverable in the minitel directory and you would not get the
billing system etc. People needed to know your phone number and dial it to
connect.

Minitel took a long time to die because it was a cash cow, both for France
Telecom and service providers. The economic model was very simple: users pay
the time spent online, and the revenue is shared between the telco and the
service provider. No ads, no tracking ;)

It was also successful because every household got a Minitel for free in the
mid-80's, when personal computers were very uncommon. And if you had a
computer, you could use the Minitel as an external model with a serial port
adapter and reach BBSes! Because of that I once had to explain to my parents
why I was spending hours calling a number in Germany, which was not a cheap
thing :P

~~~
dorfsmay
> every household got a Minitel for free

People got minitels (available for free) because phone books were eliminated,
so even people not interested by the online world (shopping, train/flight
reservations, dating "sites", high school diploma results, weather forecast,
etc...), would get one in order to be able to look up phone numbers.

~~~
wott
Phone books were not eliminated. Minitel gave you access to the phone numbers
in the whole country, whereas phone books were limited to your department (for
foreigners: France is divided in about 100 departments).

~~~
dorfsmay
Seems correct - weird, I was sure this was the case... They are eliminating
the white pages only now:

[https://www.nextinpact.com/news/98960-les-annuaires-
pagesbla...](https://www.nextinpact.com/news/98960-les-annuaires-
pagesblanches-ne-seront-plus-distribues-a-partir-2018.htm)

So it was only hosehold with a minitel that stopped receiving white pages:

"les foyers équipés de Minitel ne recevaient plus que les pages jaunes" (Homes
with Minitel received the yellow pages only)

[http://obligement.free.fr/articles/histoire_minitel.php](http://obligement.free.fr/articles/histoire_minitel.php)

~~~
bigbugbag
You ll find more about the minitel history here:
[http://www.inaglobal.fr/telecoms/article/du-minitel-
linterne](http://www.inaglobal.fr/telecoms/article/du-minitel-linterne)

------
Xoros
As stated by Jacquesm, Minitel slowed down Internet deployment in France.
Every bank, mail ordering sellers or alike already had their Minitel "site"
(in which they invested money) so jumping in the new train took time.

At the end of the 90's, I had to develop a Minitel Emulator for a French bank
who wanted to put PC based kiosks where people could have many informations
(static coded texts) but also connect to their accounts. Not a web kiosk (we
were specialized in that at the time). A minitel one.

~~~
okket
Just for the record: We had a similar experience with banks in Germany, it was
called "Bildschirmtext" or "BTX". It took a long time and a lot of emulators
until they finally adopted the Internet. Besides this, BTX was not as
omnipresent as Minitel was in France.

~~~
bigbugbag

      "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) is almost as old as Minitel and 
      technically very similar, but it was largely unsuccessful 
      because consumers had to buy expensive decoders to use it. 
      The German postal service held a monopoly on the decoders 
      that prevented competition and lower prices. Few people 
      bought the boxes, so there was little incentive for 
      companies to post content, which in turn did nothing to 
      further box sales. When the monopoly was loosened, it was 
      too late because PC-based online services had started to 
      appear.
    

[http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countrie...](http://www.liquisearch.com/minitel/minitel_in_other_countries)

------
arnaudsm
Surprisingly, the Internet is becoming centralized like the Minitel was. Is
history repeating itself?

~~~
johnflan
Specifically, the Apple app eco system comes to mind.

~~~
freehunter
Apple's apps have nothing to do with an open or closed Internet.

~~~
kyberias
But people seem to think that and they have a reason. When apps replace web
content, they quite clearly have something to do with the Internet. Web is
part of the Internet. Isn't this obvious?

~~~
freehunter
People like the guy I responded to think that because they have an axe to
grind against Apple. Notice how he said "Apple's app ecosystem" and not
"Android app ecosystem", when Google's platform is just as robust? And didn't
Microsoft start it with ActiveX and IE? Or how about "Works best with Netscape
Navigator"?

But no, it's Apple's fault. Everything is Apple's fault.

~~~
bigbugbag
Maybe I'm wrong but my interpretation was quite different.

To me he's just pointing out a fact, to me along the 20+ years since I've been
aware of the issue many things happened or didn't happen but a few specific
things come out of the pack, including the one he cited.

To me you came out as the apple fanboy who cannot stand that apple is part of
the issue and that it is undeniably apple who popularized the "app store"
model, emblematic of the problem at hands. It's only after apple's success
that the others followed suit and copied the model to recreate their own
distinct impossible to interconnect ecosystem. Even Mozilla has one now.

Yes Apple is among the GAFAM who are to blame among many others for the
current state of things, but ultimately the failure is in us who chose
voluntary submission to new masters, who failed to use our technical knowledge
to provide to other less technically inclined, who failed to force ISP to
offer the means to self host, and so on

I guess this is quite an illustration of "don't argue with fools, from a
distance people may not be able to tell the difference".

------
evaneykelen
I've always wondered how much Tim Berners-Lee was inspired by Minitel given
the fact that he must have frequently seen or even used them in the area
around CERN.

~~~
rjsw
The UK had Prestel [1], it wasn't nearly as widely used as Minitel though.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel)

------
bsaul
Funny anecdote : the founder of "free" internet provider, xavier niel, made
his first bucks running a minitel service ( an erotic service iirc, what
people called "minitel rose"), then later completely disrupted french internet
dsl access by offering unlimited high speed access for a few bucks a month. I
worked at france telecom at the time ( the old monopolistic company that owned
all the coper lines), and i remember employees not believing this offer to be
real.

------
cm2187
Interestingly, the minitel solved the monetization problem as visitors would
automatically be billed by the phone company at the rate chosen by the service
they visited.

~~~
bigbugbag
Somehow this does not add up with the PTSN era of the internet and with the
current options to be billed on your ISP bill such as internet+[1].

[1]:
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet+)
[http://internetplus.fr/](http://internetplus.fr/)

------
codecamper
I never got to use a Minitel. :(

Don't forget Plato. That was my first experience with a networked computer. In
about 1985 in Escanaba Michigan no less.

I remember chatting with someone on the Dungeons and dragons type Wizardry
game & learning they were in California. Whoa! ( I was about 10 or 11 )

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I)

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w8rbt
People who find this interesting may like to read more about the AlohaNET,
PRNET, SATNET and AMPRNet.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Aloha_and_PRNET)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet)

------
flodor
Minitel was also used a lot for chatrooms (most of them for sexual purposes).
Of course most of the women in those chatrooms where men working for the
service. A few guys has made a lot of money with it (the creator from "Free"
french internet provider). It is extremly funny because on the picture you can
see a list of nicknames, it looks like some bdsm chatroom :)

~~~
bigbugbag
Also Marc Simoncini (creator of meetic), and there's a few others.

------
fnj
The real minitel was a public domain modem comms program for MS-DOS/PC-DOS
created by the brilliant Tom Jennings in 1983 (the FidoNet guy).

~~~
dolmen
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)
:

 _The service was rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout
France in 1982_

