
Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video] - bane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g
======
hazeii
We were running a multi-user text adventure on Prestel at the time, and BT
wanted to put it Minitel (in a lot of ways, Minitel was Prestel done right -
at least technically). Cue some days in Paris running around with a 'portable'
Panasonic PC that must've weighed 25lbs; 4.77MHz, orange plasma screen and 2
ISA slots, one of which was used to hold the full-length X25 card used to
connect to Minitel. I got a lot out of that visit (mostly increased upper-body
strength).

~~~
Jaruzel
Looking at your HN username, I am guessing you are referring to Shades? Hello
there, Arch-Wiz! ;)

I lost 1000s of hours playing Prestel Shades... endlessly typing 'ret ls' at
everyone and everything... ah those were the days.

Hmm, I think I still owe my father a ton of money for all those MASSIVE phone
bills!

~~~
hazeii
That'd be 'coder' to you, Sir!

Sorry about the bills - I always felt bad about them.

~~~
Jaruzel
Ah yeah, 'Hazeii the Coder' \- I'm old, my memory is not what it was!

Do you have anything to do with the Shades that runs at games.world.co.uk ?

~~~
hazeii
Yes, Perialaga hosts it and I look in from time to time. Write a message on
the chattrack if you make it back there!

------
agumonkey
The irony is even stronger if you consider that Louis Pouzin was a strong
inspirator of packet based communications (having just done the cyclades
network system) and TCP/IP but for some reason the French national telecom
agency didn't believe in it and stuck with a different protocol for too long.

~~~
digi_owl
My understanding is that telecom in general balked at packet switching. To
them it violated the core tenent of their business, that of maintaining a
continous circuit between customers.

------
moviuro
FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their
various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety
of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence
is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our
AZERTY keyboard.

~~~
simias
AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at,
not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY
keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr
key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming
languages are qwerty-centric.

But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!

~~~
maeln
On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows
doesn't handle it.

But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it
comes to programming.

~~~
lloeki
> I think it works on Mac OS too

Indeed, same on Apple's "French" keyboard layout, unless you select the
"French (numeric)" one, in which case caps lock produces numbers. Also, ` is a
dead key, as is ^ and ¨, which works with caps too, but there's no dead key
for acute accent (é).

Other bits of trivia:

On macOS, the numeric keypad (if any) is always num-lock'd.

The Apple "French" layouts are vastly different from the PC ones (also
available as "French - PC"), relying on visual symbolism for extra glyphs
which makes them (sort of) easier to remember:

    
    
        option-n is ~ (which turns out to be a dead key)
        option-l is ¬, option-t is †
        option-shift-l is |
        option-( is { and option-shift-( is [
        “smart” ‘quotes’ are on " and ' with option and option-shift
        there are ligatures too: shiftable æ œ ﬁ on option-a o and g
        question and exclamation marks are reversed with option too: ! -> ¡ and ? -> ¿
        option-d is ∂ PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL, option-shift-s is ∑, option-m is µ, option-f is ƒ
        now guess how you do: © ™ ®
        £ gives # when option'd (even though there's a dedicated @+# key)
        shift-- is underscore, option-- is en-dash, option-shift-- is em-dash
        similarly, there's also (grouped per physical key: no mod, shift, option, shift+option):
            < > ≤ ≥
            = + ≠ ±
            : / ÷ \

------
TeddyBear060
For those who are interesting in "Minitel revival", a guy did some great job
recreating a Minitel server !

[https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-
Minitel.html](https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html)

~~~
Narishma
It's featured extensively in the video.

~~~
TeddyBear060
You're right. I just listen to the first 4 minutes and it remains me this
wonderful post.

------
candiodari
Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers"
to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results
in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways
to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the
Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the
"porn" (mostly text or chat based, some very creative "graphical" stuff),
...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is
completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when
even a lower quality "free" alternative becomes available (internet over slow
modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel).

The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every
second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared
with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. "webshops")
that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free.

The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of
course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all
was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially
web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that's similar but more complex
than web banking).

Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with "value added services" on Cell
phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the "time spent
online", and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android
and iphone.

~~~
buserror
I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the
minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in
fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for
lorries...

There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just
chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were
nowhere near the biggest. The biggest after the lorry service were sport
services (Stade 2 etc during footy times or Tour de France) -- then .gov stuff
and education (exam results).

I think for most people the 'pink services' were the ones that were advertised
most, therefore there is a bias as to what was used and popular at the time,
but from my point of view, it was nowhere near as popular as what people
believe.

For the technically minded, we were running a (lot) of Pr1me computers running
Primos -- in fact we were their primary customers before they died; we
eventually moved on to HPUX on the very first PA-RISC that came out. The
Pr1mes continued ticking along for a long while...

~~~
walshemj
Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used
Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have
root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.

~~~
hazeii
I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes.

I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader
burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various
mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ).

Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was
pretty sweet compared to working with BT.

~~~
walshemj
Prestel was GEC's GEC 4082's Telecom Gold Was Pr1mes I think all 750's

I should have really had a trip out to baynard to check it out as I was I
suppose the dev-op on the Dialcom side working on the new Billing system.

------
andrelaszlo
I recently bought a Minitel (v2 I think). Any ideas about what to do with it?
I'm thinking something with a Raspberry Pi.

~~~
hazeii
Text search engine? (submit the query to $SEARCH_ENGINE, and display the
results - or bonus points for using Gopher).

Shouldn't be hard to do 1200/75 on the Pi audio, even on the stock audio
output.

------
hawkinsw
If you like that video, you might enjoy this great book about Minitel:

[https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-
Stu...](https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform-
Studies/dp/0262036223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497646280&sr=8-1&keywords=Minitel+Welcome+to+the+Internet)

I have started to read it, but haven't made it all the way through. I love
tech history and the book is great so far!

------
KeitIG
One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be
a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people
used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic
being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats).

It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time
for those services, and the one from today with Internet.

~~~
hazeii
Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all
busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb
ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all.
Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually
numbers would have been far less than that.

Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC
'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each
mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape
drives to accompany them.

 _Edit: Number formatting._

~~~
richrichardsson
I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth
usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd
hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over
the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like
back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males
compared with today.

~~~
hazeii
I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of
the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-
bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying
the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances))
about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998.

I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of
bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more
so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris
(and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink)
adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).

------
duncan_bayne
I seem to recall Minitel was cracked, too, and used to spread spoof stock
prices? Read about it in high school in the 90s but can't find anything about
it on Google.

------
ekianjo
tech treasure? Seriously? Nostalgia aside, it was slow and expensive to use.
Internet had no penetration in France at the time so a crappy solution that
does things worse and made France late to pick up Internet afterwards hardly
qualifies as a treasure in my book.

~~~
ptaipale
The Minitel service was rolled out 1978-1982, about a dozen years before
widespread commercial adoption of Internet connections for consumers in any
country. So the Internet penetration is not really relevant here.

Yes, existing legacy technology sometimes works so well that newer things have
a hard time replacing it.

~~~
nolok
It should be added that it wasn't made technically irrelevant the minute
internet appeared either, Minitel had a few things figured out (thanks to its
centralized monolithic ways) that took internet a while to achieve. Most
important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-number
and several numbers for different price point; payment and authenticity were
the norm. Selling stuff to every days common users was a normality, it was
done without any security risk, and an impersonator pretending to be your bank
or whatever would be much taken out by France Telecom.

Meanwhile we were still trying to convince people they could buy on the
internet by the late 90's, and how to recognize which site is their official
bank and which one is a scam.

PS: Xavier Niel (the CEO/founder of Free/Illiad) is well known for having made
his money on paid minitel adult services.

We suffered late internet adoption because of the minitel, yes, but that's
because the minitel had been so good for so long that it had become part of
our normal life by then.

~~~
masklinn
> Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-
> number and several numbers for different price point; payment and
> authenticity were the norm.

And service providers could do both IAP-style (pay-for-bundle) and ongoing-
style (pay-for-stay), the latter being a great model for news services or
story providers (serials and the like).

