
Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web
======
slau
A company I worked for used to host Minitel services. In particular, it was a
system to handle driving test allotments, reservations and cancellations
between the government ("Préfecture") and the driving schools.

The service was provided for free to the government, the company organised
free training sessions for government clerks, and it was the driving schools
who paid for the service when dialling into our minitel servers.

It technically wasn't a monopoly, because the driving schools could still go
down to the préfecture, and do everything using the forms/pen/paper.

The company tried on a number of occasions to get the driving schools to move
from the Minitel service to the new web version. Every single time, there was
a huge push-back from the driving school unions, about how expensive the new
service was, and how "unusable" the website was, compared to the Minitel.

We even had people calling in, saying that we were extortionists. "We've been
using this for over 20 years, and never paid a cent; now you want us to pay
xx€ a month?" I guess some of them really didn't look at their phone bill.

I heard about 4 or 5 "planned terminations" of the Minitel service during my
stint from 2010 to 2015. France Telecom/Orange even provides a "Minitel over
IP" service these days, where a website can be enrolled into their payment
service, and users pay per minute on the website. It's a superb scam tool
(just have a hidden iframe open a pay-as-you-go page), and Orange is
constantly fighting the fraudsters.

~~~
agumonkey
Talking about migrations, I worked at two places (tax office, and large store)
that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every
time it was a disaster. I was much enamored by the old system that was hyper
efficient, both at the low level (zero bandwidth, fixed layout) and at higher
level too, all that wasn't spent on visuals and gimmicks was used for "smart"
features, semantic suggestions, math auto correct on the fly. Also almost no
learning phase. Sad.

~~~
kartan
> that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every
> time it was a disaster.

Usually the first service is build in an Agile manner. It starts small, and
more and more features are added as years pass by. Then some one decides to
create a complete new system from scratch, and they never realize all the
hidden complexity that exists in the original solution. So this second
waterfall project fails and needs years to become usable.

Happened something like that in this case? :)

~~~
agumonkey
Can't say, I wasn't working on this, I just witnessed it.

My best guess is that nobody wanted to maintain the old so IT decided to
surrender to the latest enterprise fad.

------
lloeki
A couple historical anecdotes:

There was the equivalent of the hug of death multiple times every year when
students were checking their results, overloading the servers as
(tens/hundreds of) thousands of people tried to furiously dial in
simultaneously to get results from various nationwide exams such as the
infamous Baccalauréat.

In 1981 for the presidential elections, the result was broadcasted live on the
Minitel and showed up live on the news:

(On TV) [https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao](https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao)

(Remastered Minitel output)
[https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I](https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I)

The Minitel was such a national pride that the Internet had a hard time
piercing through the habits and the collective mind, setting back France by a
couple of years on that front. Said misplaced pride is also very visible on
some other bad decision making such as forcefully applying national preference
to technology such as Bull computers in the enterprise or Thomson TO7&MO5 in
schools which were ripped apart by the competition nonetheless. This behavior
is still visible today as the government tried to push for "the French Cloud"
by heavily subsidizing software such as a poor alternative to Dropbox which
became Orange Cloud or looking the other way when Deezer was clearly violating
IP rights by padding its music catalogue as it was missing deals from the
majors. Same goes with banks shunning Apple/Android Pay in favor of being
hell-bent on that sad sad Paylib thing, and various other similar heavy cases
of NIH. I'm tentatively hopeful but very cautions about that "French SV"
thing. Wait&see.

~~~
danmaz74
As a non-French, I wouldn't say that being proud of the Minitel was misplaced
at the beginning, as it was a great accomplishment for its time. The problem
was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of
the "not invented here" problem.

Regarding "national preference", no EU country is big enough to make that work
for these kinds of technology; maybe the EU as a whole, if there wasn't the
big problem of language...

~~~
masklinn
> The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged -
> reminds me of the "not invented here" problem.

One of the issues here is that the internet was not "a clearly superior
alternative" as it had some aspects which were (and still are) significant
downgrades.

Monetisation is a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on ("kiosk"
services with a 4:2 split between the service and the network operator, with
multiple price points) and in the early 90s added secure standardised CC
payment (new models had a CC reader/terminal built in).

~~~
danmaz74
Well, if you prefer, let's say "an alternative that was obviously going to win
on the market".

PS As a consumer I find it very hard to say that use-time payment is better
than flat access cost + many different ways to pay depending on what you use.

~~~
user5994461
You seem to assume that the internet is flat fee, that is historically not the
case.

The internet was pay by the hour or pay by the kB for a very long time. The
flat free subscriptions only emerged around the 00's.

~~~
danmaz74
My first internet connection was through a 28.8k modem, I know very well that
it wasn't flat at the time, and that's exactly why I said that "pay per minute
of use" is terrible for consumers compared to today's situation, while the OP
said: "...as it had some aspects which were ( _and still are_ ) significant
downgrades. Monetisation _is_ a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very
early on"

~~~
vertex-four
I'd say the Internet still doesn't have a very good monetisation system. Card
payment is several times too much effort to use, takes a good couple of
minutes, and isn't reasonable for a one-off service. PayPal and similar
services are a mess, and not much better. The point wasn't that use-time is
good, it's that there was monetisation integrated into the design of the
system, and it was easy for the customer to use.

------
thatguy0900
"Minitel enthusiasts cherished the network’s privacy and anonymity. In late
1984, Minitel engineers added a feature to the terminal that saved the last
page visited and made it easier for the user to pick up an interrupted
session—as a browser cookie does today. The public outcry was swift and
brutal. Editorials in newspapers, which (rightly) saw Minitel as a competitor,
warned that Big Brother had arrived. Some 3,000 terminals were returned in
protest. The PTT soon dropped this feature." Pretty sad to see where we've
come since then

~~~
digi_owl
I think the basic problem is that while back then we had a low water mark of
privacy, the Soviet Union, that the west wanted to stay above as a point of
pride, these days we have none.

~~~
kalleboo
Well we have China, but western leaders seem to be more prone to using the
Chinese Great Firewall as a leading example than a bad example.

~~~
digi_owl
Funnily China seems to be treated more like a capitalist oligarchy these days
(and may well be operating like one as well).

The last remaining communist nations to be "feared" seems to be Cuba and North
Korea.

------
srge
It was great for "piracy". You had message board where people would swap
floppies. You basically copied a game (Atari ST games of course) and would
send the floppies hoping your counterpart would do the same.

It was a great time and I learnt a lot about the geek community, the sharing
and got access to many games which at age 15 I could not afford.

~~~
digi_owl
Elsewhere one made do with classified ads in computer magazines.

I wish i could find the story i read once from a guy in GB that did so for the
Amiga, and found himself so inundated with replies that he bought himself a
second drive for his A500 and spend whole weekends swapping floppies.

~~~
bigbugbag
That's what I wanted to point out, classified had much more traction than
minitel to swap disks.

------
wolfgangK
Fond memories of programming my Amiga to scrap pages from the Minitel to fill
up up database instead of doing data entry by hand, as ha been expected of me
during my first intership…

------
djhworld
Was Minitel something only the middle and upper classes had, or was it a
universal thing?

I'm from the UK, I didn't get onto the web until 1999, before that we used
Teletext. I think the advantage to it was most televisions supported Teletext
by the 1980s and it was a free service - albeit you had to pay your annual TV
license.

~~~
d--b
Everybody had one. You didn't have to buy the terminal, most people rented it
from the phone company for a few francs a month. And the most useful services
were free.

~~~
bigbugbag
try that again. At first it was given at no cost to people who accepted to
stop receiving the paper phonebook, then you could rent or buy depending on
the specific model. During the golden age about 20% homes were equipped at
peak it reached 25% (far from everybody had one).

There were no services available for free, at first there were two kinds: the
service provider pays the operator or the user pays the operator (about 3€ an
hour). no money for the service provider. Then came the kiosk offer which
started the golden age: the user now pays 9€ an hour with 6€ for the service
and 3 for the operator.

~~~
llsf
9 million terminals for a total population of 55 million, it is pretty good
coverage. I used to live in Cesson-Sévigné, where it was born. One day, my dad
came back home early 80's with one for free.

After few years everybody I know had one per household, except for my
grandparents. Pretty much every household who wanted one could get one.

Later they built more fancy terminals (faster modem, combined with phone,
better screen/graphics, etc.) and rented them. The free one was still a good
deal.

The White Pages where totally free. And if I recall the Yellow Pages had a the
first minute or so free. I remember navigating the pages as fast as possible
to not pay the fee.

As mentioned before some school results and even applications were made using
the terminal, for residual fee on the phone bill.

My mom was buying online (3Suisses, Redoute and CAMIF) through the terminal
from early 80's until early 2000. She had a hard time to move to internet
website when it comes to buy online. She heard so much of CC fraud online that
she felt safer using the Minitel.

------
jim_lawless
An effort to bring Minitel-based computing to the masses happened in Omaha,
Nebraska in the early 1990's. The service was named CommunityLink. It was a
joint venture between U.S. West ( then, a Regional Bell Operating Company )
and France Telecom.

You can see the overview beginning at minute 16:00 in this episode of the old
TV show The Computer Chronicles:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwNc1zQ0Fpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwNc1zQ0Fpg)

The above episode begins with the Minitel story from France.

CommunityLink didn't really seem to catch on, locally. We did have a thriving
BBS community at this time and most techies that I knew had CompuServe
accounts.

------
fermigier
"and dudes (mecs in French) browsed the personal ads at 3615 MEC." <\-
Something was lost in the translation there.

~~~
raverbashing
What was lost exactly? The reference to MEC is explained

~~~
dtech
Your sibling comment links the current website. Apparently it's a gay dating
service. Wasn't clear to me from the article.

~~~
raverbashing
Ah that wasn't clear to me either.

------
bane
Quick question for those who remember the time. What was BBSing like back in
the Minitel days?

In the States and other places without an equivalent system, BBSs were pretty
much the only way to connect in any kind of "on-line", but as soon as the Web
became widespread BBSs died a very quick death. I would suppose that Minitel
would have prevented an equivalent BBS scene from developing in France, but I
have no idea. I know there were reasonably big scenes in other parts of Europe
though.

~~~
kawera
There were plenty of BBSs in France at the time but mostly used by people who
were "into computers". Oh, and Compuserve!

------
ekianjo
Is this just me or are we getting more and more articles about the Minitel on
HN these days?

~~~
agumonkey
Not only HN, I think it's been on reddit too. It's odd since the service has
been removed entirely a few years ago and already got coverage at that time.

Maybe the issues with net neutrality push people into history. Similarly there
were Ethernet stories last week.

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, I tend to think that we're all looking for an alternative to the looming
destruction of the Internet that is inevitably going to happen when Net-
neutrality dies.

As an older user, I'd love it if we could figure out a way to resurrect
Minitel/Teletext and use it as a way of routing around the damage that is
coming from the political classes.

~~~
ekianjo
> for an alternative to the looming destruction of the Internet that is
> inevitably going to happen when Net-neutrality dies.

The Minitel was the archetype of service centralization with a single hardware
provider. Hardly a good case for Net neutrality.

~~~
llsf
Yes, very centralized, but in early 80's with telco companies having pretty
much a monopoly on their own respective market, and practically no standard
hardware, the Minitel was the best that could be done to get a large chunk of
the population to go online, make safely online transactions, exchange
messages, before the Web.

Today, 35 years after with what we know, with a deregulated telco environment,
with internet protocols and corresponding hardware, sure, the Minitel is not
ideal for net neutrality. I think it was still a good step, and looking back,
not a too shabby execution either. Now 35 years later, the market brought
Android smartphone, which are the new commodity for people to go online.

------
webreac
I remember having used minitel 1B (80 colomns) in 1992 to connect to my school
from home (600km away) to send my updated (using vi) report (in latex) to my
teacher. The main drawback of course was that the phone line was always busy.
It was using a quite cheap (the equivalent of 0.02€ per minutes) connection
(36 21).

------
jedisct1
Anyone with Minitels or compatible modems could run their own service, just
like a BBS.

There were quite a lot of these services, that anyone could connect to, for
just the cost of a local communication.

They had interesting features such as file transfers, real-time multiparty
chatrooms, the ability to define macros (custom sequences of control code to
display fancy images and animations in discussion boards and chatrooms), and
more.

At that time, local phone calls were not free, but they were cheap compared to
longer-distance (but still in France) calls.

So, these services were federating very local communities. Members frequently
met in person. Think about Facebook just for your city, where most people in
your friend list are people you actually know in person and often hang out
with.

That was pretty awesome. Internet being global is amazing, but these very
local communities were also amazing in a different way.

------
gumby
The article isn't kidding when it said that the old phone system was terrible,
phones typically had a second earpiece so you could hear through both ears in
the hope of making out what the other party said.

And them in a huge jump foreward, the PTT switched to digital and by 1980
anybody could get digital service (isdn) cheaply at their house.

------
ForHackernews
Some previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881)

------
drewmate
What was the significance of the '3615' in all the service codes? Was this
just a common prefix like 'www' in web addresses?

~~~
vbernat
It's the short phone number to dial to get access to the portal where you
enter the name of the service you want. There were different ones with
different pricing. 3614 was cheaper (no revenue for the service I think), 3615
was regular and 3617 was expensive (you could buy stuff, like games by staying
online).

While most services were accessible through this portal (operated by the
French telco), you could also dial a "regular number" to access some services
à la BBS.

------
MayeulC
For what it's worth, I still have one around here. It makes for a great retro-
terminal that can be plugged on a 1200 bauds serial connection. I agree that
it isn't the most lightweight solution, but it at least works pretty well, and
without hassle.

------
digi_owl
As an aside, i recall running into something similar to a Minitel, only it was
web based and used ISDN for connectivity.

Basically it was a desk phone with a slide out keyboard and embedded web
browser.

~~~
kalleboo
There were a bunch of devices kind of like that around the dot-com boom
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey)

------
grumblestumble
Also, shoutout to BelTel in South Africa, my first foray into online world,
including national chat, way back in 1985.

------
genericacct
Credit where credit is due: the french invented fembots

------
mrkrab
Don't forget about Infovía in Spain, too, even though that was much later.

~~~
gaius
And Prestel in the UK, but it was never as ubiquitous as le Minitel.

~~~
tobltobs
And Bildschirmtext (BTX) in Germany.

------
tormeh
Minitel really illustrates my view on the tech business: Go global or go home.
Scale is King.

~~~
makapuf
Well Minitel tried to go global there was a Californian trial (and a country
wide scale was unheard or for online services).

~~~
revscat
It was called USVideotel, and it was moderately successful. I worked for them
in the late 80s. It was very popular amongst its users, but eventually lost to
Prodigy and AOL.

