
Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - rbanffy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web
======
kuharich
Prior discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561)

------
verri
It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some
kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off?
There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can't find much information
on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial
reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these
networks?

~~~
rjsw
Calling a foreign address worked fine, there was a prefix code for each
network.

------
gavman
Reply All did a great episode all about Minitel, for those interested:
[https://gimletmedia.com/episode/french-
connection/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/french-connection/)

------
patkai
I graduated from a Telecommunications technical school in Budapest in 1992. We
took the exam from relay-based switching centres (also 7A2 and ARF102) and had
to repair an old style rotary dial phone to pass and get a diploma. Our
teacher told us about Minitel in France but emphasised that the real thing
will be ISDN (64kbps). In a couple of years in college I had high speed
Internet access, Silicon Graphics workstations with those beautiful, huge blue
monitors. It is hard to imagine nowadays what a change that was, though
switching from my Motorola flip phone to iPhone 4 was also quite something.

------
grumblestumble
South Africa also had Beltel around that time, a very similar service I'm
sure. I remember being wowed by the real-time cross-country chat and the
better-than-ANSI block shapes for drawing :)

------
drpgq
Interesting that at the same time I was using a C64 with 300 and 1200 baud
modems to get on the local BBSs in Canada. Which was way more of a hassle.

~~~
wolco
Any favourites you can remember?

~~~
drpgq
The pub won one. A few of my friends ran their own small ones that mainly just
us.

------
rbanffy
Not sure what other systems ran, but, AFAIK, the one in São Paulo, called
Videotexto, was served out of a DPS-8M mainframe running MULTICS.

------
fottuto
Proud "Videotel" owner from Italy (worked on ITAPAC x25). Same as minitel, and
with some tricks you'd have QSD as well ;-)

------
walshemj
Apart from PRESTEL which preceded Minitel I am sure Samuel Fedida would take a
dim view of the IEEE not mentioining him.

~~~
IrishJourno
The article notes PRESTEL, and points out the key technical difference between
the PRESTEL and Minitel architectures:

"Although [Minitel] wasn’t the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology
during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service providers to
operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only the network, whereas
in most other countries, a single organization had centralized control of both
the network and servers for the videotex system.

In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the Prestel videotex system
was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General Post Office."

------
marindez
Covered many times here:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minitel&sort=byPopularity&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minitel&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Don't forget about Infovía in Spain!

~~~
Johnythree
And Viatel in Australia

[https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2wu5va/viatel_au...](https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2wu5va/viatel_australias_internet_before_the_internet/)

