
Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) - abhiminator
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web
======
fmajid
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
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
FYI, your email is not visible. You should put it in the "about" section of
your profile.

------
tmilard
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
What do men get out of catfishing other men?

~~~
rchaud
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.

~~~
PoachedSausage
>surveillance tech was in the stone ages.

I believe it is a mistake to think that. I have some notes from an
undergraduate course in digital signal processing, dated 1979. There is a
section written by someone from "Joint Speech Research Unit, Cheltenham" there
can only be one organisation in that town interested in researching speech,
good friends of No Such Agency.

------
lqet
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](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext)

------
philprx
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
> 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](https://farsite.com/X.25/X.25_info/X.25.htm)

~~~
philprx
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.

~~~
non-entity
Haha. I've been "working" on an X.25 implementation on a PC and it took me an
embarrassingly long time to figure out what the hell a PAD was ever needed
for.

~~~
icedchai
My understanding 30 years ago was a "PAD" was the TCP/IP equivalent of a
"terminal server", translating serial streams to network connections. This may
be an overly simplistic view, I don't know. It's been a very long time!

Are there any public x.25 networks still operating?

~~~
non-entity
> Are there any public x.25 networks still operating?

Not that I know of. My plan if to use old line simulators and other tools i
can find on ebay and telcom equipment reseller sites to create a "fake"
private one. This is one of those projects that I'm working on purely out of
novelty interest :P.

~~~
icedchai
Sounds cool! Perhaps you could create the x.25 equivalent of HECNet, the
hobbyist DECnet.

------
macdice
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.

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

~~~
macdice
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!

~~~
anthk
I'd love to play Nethack or IF in that machine.

~~~
macdice
If I had space in my life for more retro-junk I'd definitely love to have a
working DEC VT100 or Lear Siegler ADM-3A if I could find one with the tube in
good sharp condition so you could actually really use it to hack code on...
but they probably go for a fortune by now, and ... well I just don't have
space. For a slightly less rare and valuable terminal, a Wyse 60 would also be
a good option (unless I'm misremembering, the keyboards were very nice and you
could absolutely work on one of those today). When I was a kid all the
libraries had Wyse 60s as catalogue search terminals, and I also learned how
to use Unix through one of those beautiful things.

~~~
frank2
I had a couple of Wyse 60s that looked basically new when I got them, and they
both broke (refused to display anything) quickly. It is rare in general for
computer equipment to break when in my possession.

~~~
frank2
Oops: it was Wyse 55s I had (but they look just like the pictures of Wyse 60s
I found on the web).

------
fabiensanglard
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.

~~~
philprx
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.

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

~~~
philprx
Yes, these were pretty rare and l33t ;-)

There were a couple, a university AIX, a CDC NOS/VE with IP connectivity,
etc...

Basically, free international comms back in the 90s!

~~~
anthk
I know. Free usenet, mail, IRC... at a gratis cost in the 90's would be like a
godsend. You lucky...

~~~
philprx
Nahh... it was really hard work^W fun to get them ;-)

------
caymanjim
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?

~~~
icedchai
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?

~~~
caymanjim
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.

~~~
philprx
Lutz, althh, tchh, Lina, Pegasus, ... many people thought some of these were
sting operations.

My hand still remembers some NUA by heart even if I didn’t connect to these
for 30 years.

------
raoulvolfoni
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/](http://hxc2001.free.fr/minitel/)
[https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo](https://youtu.be/a2HD6OzNoEo)

------
webreac
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.

~~~
anthk
How much did it cost?

~~~
webreac
.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).

~~~
anthk
A bit expensive in 1992. I say this as a Spaniard, OFC the costs of living in
France was higher than ours, now are pretty even.

EDIT: per hour, about 5C per minute, or 2.5C per minute. It's like a local
call, then.

------
dang
If curious see also for your Minitel needs:

2018
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820)

2018
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093)

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405)

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561)

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881)

2012
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141)

2012
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531)

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

2011
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106)

------
maire
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](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.

~~~
082349872349872
[https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/cwi-achievements-
details](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...](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/613/534)

> "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](https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html)

~~~
gumby
> "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.

~~~
082349872349872
[https://halshs.archives-
ouvertes.fr/halshs-01824541/document](https://halshs.archives-
ouvertes.fr/halshs-01824541/document)

suggests all may be true: TRANSPAC was X.25 (presumably terminated similarly
at MIT? I know nothing about ITU.), USENET piggybacked on voice networks, and
1988 was presumably when regular IP packets started being routed.

~~~
082349872349872
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/connecting-
britain/fi...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/connecting-
britain/first-public-transatlantic-phone-service/)

suggests that international direct dial wasn't even widespread in the UK
before the 1980's.

------
abhiminator
[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](https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208)

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

~~~
justin66
> 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
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.

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

~~~
WhoIsSatoshi
Better graphics?

~~~
agumonkey
more pop ups

~~~
082349872349872
The dactylo du chat, it's coded in HTML5 in place of Antiope.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302608)

------
andrewstuart
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](https://www.ebay.fr/sch/i.html?_nkw=minitel)

~~~
philprx
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

~~~
MayeulC
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.

~~~
philprx
What you need to build the adapter:

[http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361](http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361)

Use online translator and ping me if needed.

~~~
anthk
Can I use a 230V minitel on a 220V plug in Spain?

We use 50hz too.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Don't see why not, most European equipment is built to handle a range of
220-240V at least, whatever the marking says. At worst the screen might
display slightly smaller than intended.

~~~
anthk
I'm afraid of signal drops.

------
cm2187
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.

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

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

~~~
aembleton
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.

~~~
rsynnott
I think the primary problem with NTSC was more colour-related than lines-
related, though the argument still basically stands.

Interestingly, this one went back and forth, AIUI. The initial British
(monochrome) standards, which was very early, was quite flawed; later US
standards improved on that, then NTSC improved on those, then PAL and SECAM
improved on that (and bounced off each other a bit; the version of PAL that
was eventually released used concepts from SECAM).

France, being France, did its own thing on the colour transition; SECAM wasn't
used anywhere else in Western Europe (SECAM was better than both PAL and NTSC
for the end user, but was hard to work with and not commonly used).

British and Irish TV channels, incidentally, continued to broadcast the pre-
PAL standard on separate frequencies until surprisingly late. I believe the
Irish broadcaster only stopped in the _90s_, when their conversion equipment
became unreliable.

~~~
hyakosm
Similarly, the French first program ("première chaine de l'ORTF" before 1975,
TF1 after) was transmitted in 625 lines SÉCAM on UHF band and simultaneously
on 819 lines black & white on VHF.

Old black & white 819 lines was the more highly defined television system
before HDTV.

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

~~~
aphroz
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.

~~~
pjc50
Minitel was run by the French state, it doesn't get much more centralised than
that! And of course far-right or Nazi messageboards would have got censored
off it immediately.

(I have no idea whether there was much politics content on minitel, but I've
not heard of it, and would be interested in references)

~~~
hyakosm
On the french Minitel a lot of discussion forums were private owned and not
really censored. I think the censorship is more heavy on facebook than it was
on minitel services.

------
mastazi
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.

------
tenbino
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).

~~~
boudin
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
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.

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

------
jtokoph
Here is the Computer Chronicles coverage of minitel:
[https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186](https://youtu.be/DUx7dP2S7h4?t=186)

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

------
rcarmo
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).

------
grandinj
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).

------
danw1979
Another really good brief history of Minitel from the Creatures Of Thought
blog -[https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-
fragmentat...](https://technicshistory.com/2020/05/17/the-era-of-
fragmentation-part-3-the-statists/)

------
bb101
"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.

~~~
philprx
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.

------
snom380
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-...](https://sites.google.com/site/collectionminitel/equipements-
terminaux/minitel-1-couleur-radiotechnique)

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

~~~
philprx
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.

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

------
seapunk
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.

------
nabla9
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_\(online_platform\))

~~~
anthk
MSN too.

------
mhd
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
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](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1983-07/mode/2up)

------
chaoticmass
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.

~~~
frank2
That was the consideration that persuaded the French office in charge of the
telephone network to make the initial investment in Minitel.

------
raverbashing
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)

~~~
frank2
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)

------
agumonkey
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 ?

------
kuharich
Past comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405)

------
mytailorisrich
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)

------
UncleSlacky
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.

------
presspot
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.

------
tinus_hn
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.

~~~
anthk
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
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.

~~~
ghaff
The use of French in diplomacy was primarily an outgrowth of it having been
the court language of continental Europe. You also had dominant languages for
other purposes--for certain fields of science, you sort of needed to know
German.

But as the world increasingly globalized, there were a lot of forces to have a
fairly universal language. And between the once huge British Empire and the
industrial dominance of the US post-WWII, that language naturally became
English.

~~~
masswerk
Before WWII French was certainly considered the most important foreign
language in continental Europe and English eventually became prevalent only
after. (I vividly remember my grandma being somewhat disappointed that we were
taught English as the first foreign language in school, instead of French.)

It may not be that far fetched to imagine a 1930s internet ("The League of
Thoughts") coming somewhat naturally in French.

~~~
artificial
That's an excellent name! I think about William Gibson's novels about
Babbage's machine being hooked up to a telegraph resulting in an earlier
"internet" revolution.

~~~
masswerk
My "ligue des pensées" (LDP), AKA "Gedankenbund", AKA "League of Thoughts"
(LoT) is certainly based on storing analog signals on refreshing electrostatic
drums and projecting the image (images!) on CRTs. There's a nice railway print
of the futuristic main hub of the British part of the LoT at New Castle,
exposing the stylized cylindrical shape of the storage drums in its main tower
(nicely lit in electric blue by high the voltage discharge of the drums
inside). A delicate chapter in the history of the LDP is the niche of the
"valses roses", which inevitably evolved into a major business. In many
countries some opposition of mostly moral objection arose, especially in
Germany, where a rising NSDAP feared for the health of the populus and for the
sanity of German men who were exposed to the finer details of the anatomy of
foreign women, which in turn lead to its smashing defeat in the 1933 election…
:-)

\----

Edit, on the technology of the LoT: This was some of a joint European effort.
A crucial part was the storage of the analogue image signal on a continuously
refreshed electrostatic drum, invented by Dr Ludwig Chevenmüller in the early
1920s. A major breakthrough was then the contribution of a young Tommy
Flowers, who came up with a way to combine discrete signals suitable for
relay-based automatic dialling with the analog signals that provided the
content. In a somewhat parallel strain Thierry du Pont du Lac invented his
"lecteur discret", which did much the same for character based signals in
Baudot code, which was eventually combined in the vertical blank of the analog
image signal and stored on the terminal side on a second drum, to be
superimposed by a tiny typesetting machine and an array of electrostatic
lenses onto the analog Chevenmüller image. (Alternatively, the combined image
could be redirected onto a third drum, from which it could be printed using a
technique similar to stencils. Seasoned users of the LoT may remember the
typical smell quite well.) But the LoT only really took of, when BASF came up
with a way to compress the Chevenmüller signal into rapid bursts, which
enabled the rather astounding speed of the network.

