
France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B - jgrahamc
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/30/business/computer-linkups-spurred-by-france.html?scp=3&sq=minitel&st=nyt
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masklinn
The Minitel was so entrenched long into the 90s it quite significantly
hampered the original deployment of the 'net in France:

* No need to register anywhere to use it (your identity was connected to your landline)

* No maintenance or security issues

* No compatibility issues (everything was pretty low-tech, but following strict standards)

On the other hand, it had online payments, payments to sites (the national
access provider charged based on access time depending on the service you
connected to, and part of the money was funnelled to the service provider) and
social media-based civil resistance (french university students coordinated
strikes using Minitel as early as 1986). As a result the french population was
not really taken aback by those capabilities in the interwebs, they were kinda
used to them.

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alx
I'm from Tetalab, a hackerspace in Toulouse, France, and we still use the
minitel for some hacks with arduino:

<http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg>

It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and
it quite easy to hack it.

We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be
quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore,
it's quite easy to find second-hand, but surely heavy to ship...)

~~~
kahawe
How difficult would it be to make a proxy for it and make minitel accessible
world wide? Do they bill you per minute?

~~~
madflo
Yes, they do. There are several billing schemes. Usually a connexion fee plus
a per minute billing.

The fun part being that there was e-mail and www services accessible from the
Minitel.

France Telecom internet provider, Wanadoo (now Orange) used to provide an
ActiveX application to access the Minitel over IP; with the per minute usage
being billed on the Internet account owner tab.

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Nicolas___
Funny thing is that today, despite the fact that everybody has a broadband
connection, Minitel is still used by some people. Specifically for the 2
usages that made its success in the first place : yellow pages and _adult_
chat.

A few companies still make significant profit from this platform in 2011. And
it's still profitable for France Telecom as well.

Low tech works :)

~~~
p4bl0
Sadly, the service will be discontinued soon (june 2012). I don't use it but I
find it cool to have an alternative network like this.

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snippyhollow
One of many fun facts: Xavier Niel (controversial CEO of Free, disruptive
French ISP) made his first $ - sorry Francs - by selling adult chat on the
Minitel.

~~~
galactus
When I lived in France I loved Free. Best ISP I have ever used

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zwieback
We were one of the few households in Germany that had BTX, the German
equivalent of Minitel. It wasn't free but pretty affordable and had some very
useful services. Since banking in Germany never heavily relied on checks
everyone was already using direct bank account transfers for payments as long
as I can remember, certainly in the 80s. You filled out a standard machine
readable slip and dropped it off at your bank and the transfer would happen
immediately.

I frequently used BTX to make payments for things I ordered and I seem to
remember having a list of one-time use numbers to enter as a security measure.
Must have been some kind of electronic signature.

Germany was pretty anti-technology in those days. Instead of hailing early
adopters we were frequently criticized as harbingers of a cold and inhumane
new world order.

~~~
rsynnott
There was also an attempt to introduce a Minitel system here in Ireland. It
was ridiculously badly-timed; by the time it was actually up and running,
things like Compuserve were around and the first ISPs were only a couple of
years away.

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abeppu
It makes me a bit sad to realize that even I remember minitel, though I grew
up with the internet, and not in France -- not because I'm into tech history,
but because in 2002, that's how old my high-school French textbook and its
helpful cultural asides were.

~~~
lanstein
Same, and somehow, apparently, I still remember that the slang for it is 'le
mini'. I really need to call realloc() on that.

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rbanffy
I met my first wife on Minitel (Brazil had a several Minitel networks operated
by its telcos that operated from the early 80s through mid 90s). I met my
second wife at a party.

~~~
arthur_debert
That is definitely new to me. Granted, I was a child in the 80s but I never
new that we had minitels down here. Live and learn.

~~~
rbanffy
It was called "videotexto". Telesp had, AFAIK, the largest install (in terms
of pages and functions) but Telerj also had its own network. At that time, it
was common for BBSs to support Minitel terminals connecting through 1200/75
(v.23, AFAIK) modems.

<http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletexto#No_Brasil>

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MatthewPhillips
> Eventually the French Post Office hopes to turn a profit by charging
> companies for making their names available to Minitel subscribers.

30 years later and ISPs are trying to do this again.

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antirez
I remember that in Italy there were a lot of minitels and what was impressive
was that there were minitel pages where you could buy services, it was pretty
impressive and the "chat" page was full of people. I remember I was a bit
shocked when a few years later no body was using it anymore... I wonder why it
failed even before the internet started to be widely used.

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mikecane
Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what
gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's
ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the
Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.

~~~
LaGrange
Except the cases where central planning works, like (DUH!) Minitel (until the
internet came, it didn't fail, it just got upgraded, duh), going to the Moon
(distributed attempt at reaching the moon, also known as the living pyramid),
justice system (as soon as you introduce the ability for appeal), the
Internet, DNS system (it may be not centralized, but it is centrally planned),
Google, Apple, and your own consciousness.

Central planning never works.

~~~
iwwr
The problem is not that central planning fails to build a certain thing (like
a bridge or a road), but that it diverts resources from more productive uses.
Things that are built or created are visible, but they obscure the things that
might have been created otherwise. We never actually get to know the ways
resources might have been allocated otherwise; and indeed these other things
may be mundane and boring, yet they are the consequence of the free choices of
individuals.

Of course, it can be argued that governments don't just do investments, that
they can provide services that may be impossible to obtain otherwise. But when
we wonder into real investment territory (like a particular bridge), we have
to be able to produce a R.O.I.

What we have to consider is that the alternative uses of the capital will
contribute to economic growth and in a longer timeframe, the glamorous visible
things like a space program may actually pay for themselves. Not only that,
these expenditures will be self-sustaining and long lasting. Or otherwise
said, money spent on space (and other visible things) without a R.O.I. is
actually detracting from future growth and delaying actual practical space
exploration.

~~~
Duff
Problem is the wrong word. It's different.

In central planning, the dynamics are different. Whomever influences the
planners ultimately makes the decisions. The quality of those decisions
depends on your perspective and the motivation of the influencers.

In a pure capitalist model, you follow the money. Whomever has money
influences the decisions.

There's no right or wrong answer. Oftentimes valuable things appear as
unintended consequences of government or commercial projects.

It's hard to declare the internet to not be an example of central planning --
it was built to connect Federally funded labs at universities with Federal
dollars. The labs existed to provide (indirectly or directly) research to
serve defense and space (which i consider to be a subset of defense)
interests.

The difference between the French thing and the Internet is that key
stakeholders in the government and academia saw the potential of computer
networks as a driver of commerce at an opportune time. If that conclusion was
made in 1978, we'd have the French thing on a terminal leased from AT&T or a
baby bell.

Equating a telecom system to a railroad, bridge, road, etc from a government
POV was a big leap -- but the timing was probably more important and less
obvious.

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Duckpaddle2
We actually had a Minitel service in Houston which in its way was a successful
gaming platform. The social aspect never really took off.

~~~
afiler
I had to look this up after you mentioned it. Looks like it was run by a
company called US Videotel:
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/minitel-
usa/inde...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/minitel-
usa/index.html)

I know the US also had some trials of teletext (text pages over broadcast TV)
too, but I think that was even less successful than videotel.

------
kahawe
With prestel, BTX and MUPID there were quite a few prior technologies but to
my knowledge, this only really took off like that in France due to substantial
public funding.

Prestel in UK died and BTX in Germany/Austria was but a novelty AFAIR. I have
never seen BTX being widely used here but when I was on vacation in France,
sure enough even the rest stops on the highway had a few minitel terminals you
could pay for. And that was around 94 or 95 when the internet has already been
heard of around here in Europe and the first ISPs started popping up.

