Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo! Now On France's Minitel System
RomulusNR writes: "Just posted to the Dead Media e-mail list this week, a story that Yahoo! is making a version of its site for the Minitel. Makes sense; take advantage of existing infrastructure instead of trying to reinvent and replace it. And after last week's story about the Gopher Manifesto, I wonder if we will see a Gopher version; after all the text-only, line-by-line interface is common to Gopher just as it is to WML devices and Minitel. And Minitel's older, isn't it?"
A few remarks to people ready to diss the Minitel system. The Minitel was designed so that it would
- be cheap, since the terminal and some services
were provided for free;
- run even for users with a horrible home
installation in some remote village;
- be resistant;
- have a simple business model;
- be usable by most people.
Sure, the technology behind should have been improved. Please note that PCs with 56k modems fit none of the above (although the condition of the phone line may not be relevant anymore, since people tend to have had balky in-house connections replaced and the POTS network is now very high quality). The fact is that today, many people, including categories traditionnally found to be allergic to new technologies, use it and use electronic commerce. Electronic commerce has existed in France for 15 years.Now I pretend that there was a lesson to be taught from there. Thousands of companies started stuff on the Minitel (yeah, start-ups before it was hype to make Internet start-ups). Most of them went belly up. The successful mail-order retailers were those who:
- had a simple, costless Minitel site (0.37 FRF per minute at most);
- had warehouses and other systems so that they could deliver the wares quickly;
- offered reasonable prices.
boo.com fitted none of the above, and it's no wonder to me it has gone belly up.Bull. $1/min is for specific services that nobody is interested in (dating, for example). Services-related to commerce, phone books travels, banking, etc..., are much cheaper. (between 2c/min and 10c/min, basically).
And, being a dumb ascii termical, Minitel is very fast, 2400 bps or not. You never wait more than 3 or 4 seconds to have your page displayed. It is extremely easy to use. Another non-negligible thing is that it is immeidately ready to use when you turn it on, you don't wait for a system to boot, you don't have to look for the right icon, etc... Just turn it on, and you're ready.
> Not even : it was 75/1200 bauds.
I can't beleive I made sooo much errors in my post. Sure, it was 75/1200.
> how would would you type more than 9 8-bit characters per second in order to explode this debit ?
I used a minitel hooked to a NeXTstation to move files from/to my university account in 1991. I used the 75 bauds as a control connection. That was fun.
And it was possible to "reverse" the modem to get 1200/75.
Cheers, and thanks for the corrections,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
> the problem was to upload
I could reverse the modem on the model I used (that I still have). Was a magic key combination, like Function-M, R (Modem, Reversed), or something like that...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Is there anyone out there perverse enough to hack a text-only, hardcopy browser so that we can all surf the Web on Decwriters at 110 baud?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
This is ridiculous. The French _do_ teach their children about the holocausts, and _do_ show nazi artefacts. Don't worry for us, we're very well informed about the Nazi era. We don't burn or hide anything. And, quite franfly, coming from (I assume) an American, these comments are very ironic.
Here we've had an agressive association led by dumbasses who found a sympathetic judge. Period. Now get back to your kindergarten and stop teaching lessons on issues you have no clue about.
And here we go again... One more Francophobic who has such a hard time facing the idea that France can sometimes do interesting things, that he feels obliged to find a twisted interpretation which will give him one more chance to insult them.
This is boring, conformist (especially from a Scandinavian) and predictible.
..used to be called Prestel, a Teletext type service received over the phone. A rather famous early hacking case arose when a couple of people hacked their way into the Duke of Edinburghs (the Queens husband, for any Yanks out there) postbox. IIRC, the two people (Gold and Schifreen?) hacked their way in, told BT how it was possible, got arrested, charged and imprisoned, and won on appeal. Another famous case of British justice in action!
Teletext itself actually is capable of a lot more things than 40x25 character displays, and ASCII art. There are (or used to be) various Teletext support levels, and displays which support higher levels can display higher resolution graphics. You also used to be able to download programs from them; UK owners of the BBC Micro (which together with the Sinclair ZX80/81/ Spectrum kick started personal computing in the UK) could download programs over air.
Also when costs of Internet access were sky high, many companies used teletext to multicast to their various offices using encrypted teletext ( Conditional Access). Ladbrokes, one of the largest UK betting concerns, used to do this (and may still do so).
In the US, I believe you sacrifice Teletext for Closed Captioning Subtitles, which teletext also supports in a more limited fashion.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Probably not as mush as I enjoy the accumulation of francophobic cliches which seem to be recurrent on slashdot. I had decided, a few years ago, to ignore them and never reply. I changed my mind recently for various reasons, including the feeling that most attacks were unfair, or pointed at the wrong target and at the wrong problem. So I decided to answer en masse.
Now, in case you haven't noticed, my position is always a defensive one. I don't spontaneously attack other countries, since I actually happen to love most of the places where the francophobic feeling seems to be the strongest, including the US, where I'm currently living, the UK, and Sweden. But, well, yeah, I love France too, and I have a problem when I read unfair contributions about it. Now, if you want me to make a very harsch enumeration of the flaws of the French society, I can make a very long one! I'm just asking for some more truth and objectivity, if you see what I mean...
Last, your "Mr Collaborationist" may deserve an explanation. Please feel free to elaborate on it.
The timing for the Yahoo Minitel portal is perfect. France Telecom, owner of the Minitel system, has recently launched a huge advertising campaign for its computer-version of the Minitel : "iMinitel" (read "eemeeneetel"), a PC program that allows you to connect on the Minitel network.
The minitel system is antiquated. It's slow, text-mode (although ncurses-like "graphics" are commonly used) and much more expensive than the internet. So how could it survive ?
The answer is simple: "business model". So far, few internet companies have been able to develop a sustainable business model (ie something more profitable than "putting banner ads everywhere"). The Minitel system, on the other hand, is based on a pay-per-minute scheme. If you want to provide some service on Minitel (say, an access to some big legal database), you simply choose a pricing category (from the cheap 3614 to the $1/min 3617). When people connect to your service, they pay the price you chose to France Telecom, who keeps a part of it and gives you the rest. Ridiculous charges, maximal profit. A service provider's dream.
This is why many non-public national databases (such as Euridile, the national register of commerce) can only be accessed through the Minitel system. And this is also the reason why such a deprecated system as the minitel might survive for years, coexisting with the cheaper, faster, better Internet system.
Maybe its possible that you could learn something from this minitel homepage
A famous adage states: "old hardware doesn't necessarily good hardware make", particularly when it comes to e-commerce.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
is quite interesting really.
:-)
As a French I've witnessed the great success of the Minitel, and then the arrival of the Internet era.
E-commerce (e stands for electronic? Right, so it applies also to Minitel) has been a reality on the Minitel well before on Internet: VPC, buying train-tickets, making reservations etc..
It was quite fun seeing all the hype about the Internet when (at the beginning) it was doing much fewer things.
I've always wondered why the Minitel didn't evolve at all since its beginning : same slow connection, no images, etc.
E-commerce on the Internet has still some problems due to security concerns, when this last problem will be solved, the Minitel will be definitely dead, right now it is dying but it is not totally buried, yet
This is old news. I can't recall where I read it first exactly, but it was probably here at The Standard, where it appeared almost a month ago.
that auctions.yahoo.com will not be one of the ported areas... ;-)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Yes, minitel is dying, but slowly. There is still a large captive audience, slowly being eaten away by the internet. Internet access requires a rather expensive computer, while minitel requires just a free terminal given away by FT.
The new iMinitel service requires you to enter a valid credit card number, so all of your activity can be billed. There is a minimum charge of 50F/month, so you are enticed to use it.
The business model was a good one, back when the services could all be billed by the telco monopoly. With the exception of a few government services available exclusively through minitel, the only other businesses which thrived were the pr0n services.
And to correct some technical info posted below, the minitel system originally used V.23bis, an asymetric modulation system 75 baud up, 1200 baud down. The character set was a bizarre set of 7 bit characters, with numerous overlay character and graphics sets, and a whole bunch of control codes and sequences. It made translating to/from ascii or any other terminal program almost impossible. Many minitel server companies offered special delay modes to slow down delivery of characters to the screen, to ensure that a customer would stay online longer and increase revenues. This current iMinitel emulator also runs slowly, no matter how much internet bandwidth you have. The servers are still set up to deliver content slowly, in the name of revenue enhancement. Very frustrating.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
> Original minitel was 300/1200 bauds.
Not even : it was 75/1200 bauds.
And so ?
With a mecanichal keyboard, how would wou type more than 9 8-bit characters per second in order to explode this debit ?
I believe this was a wise choice that helped the minitel being cheaper to build.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Ok, several things here:
1- The message you're talking about and which was moderated down as "off-topic" has the following content:
"Should we also not teach children about the Holocaust? After all, talking about Nazi's is not good! Should we burn all the war-films and propoganda material from both the Axis and Allied forces, what with all those harrowing scenes of Jews, Gays etc. being murdered?
Personally, i'm inclined to believe that France simply doesn't want to face upto it's past involvment and cooperation with the Nazi's during WWII, much easier to hide it all and pretend it didn't happen isn't it?"
Quite franfly, while I cannot speak in place of the moderator, I do think this message is clearly off-topic in the discussion (which was about, as you remember, a surprising move from Yahoo going Minitel), and I don't think that the moderator was politically-motivated. On the other hand, I think that your reaction to this moderation and your reposting of the message were politically-motivated. So was I, by the way. The three of us are off-topic anyway. But I didn't start the fire.
2- I did not attack you, but the content of this message, which was apparently not written by yourself (correct me if I'm wrong).
3- It may be time to invoke Godwin's law, since you called my tactics "brownshirt", which I find somewhat ridiculous.
Those BBS store-and-forward message networks were pretty cool. I spent a number of years on them in the early 90's (particularly RIME/RelayNet) when local BBSes were about the only type of affordable "online" resource available.
Fido was neat because you could do file requests and point-to-point e-mail as well as echomail (if your Sysop would let you, anyway ).
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The reality is that all the major services available (for a fee) on the Minitel (reverse phone book, train and plane reservation, ...) are now available for free on internet.
This data (and all the law-related date) was quite late, because of monopoly concessions, but it is now mostly available for free on the internet, too.The mintel is dead, dead, dead. And France Telecom has already determined the date (somewhere in the next 3 years, I think) at which the Teletel system will CLOSE.
Grusse Herr Zemran.
Maybe France is too stupid too learn anything but you (I assume you're American) don't seem keen on giving a proper education to your feloow-citzen, especially after watching your staffing issues that urge you to beg for some French workers to help you meet the deadlines your stupid project leaders set.
So, stop this (stupid would be a pleonasm) flamewar and just assume that in a country which population is mostly composed of strangers you just appear to be even more stupid when you spit at your relatives who you owe BeOS and Altavista amongst others.
Adiö Mitenand.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
There is just one little piece of logic that I don't understand: why do you have an index of the WWW on a system which can't access the WWW?
SSL Certificate
Minitel is:
* Expensive (very expensive. more than you can imagine)
* Sloooow. Original minitel was 300/1200 bauds. Sloowiness of the minitel is part of the business model, as France Telecom and the information provider is paid depending on the amount of time the poor asshole stay connected.
* Proprietary. On internet, anyone can publish information. On the minitel, everything is controlled by France Telecom (which by the way have _no_ liability on what content is on the minitel. Typical french doublespeak: mygale.org have been closed because a member put nude picture of Estelle Halliday on line, but FT is not liable for anything that goes thought the minitel).
* Ugly. Text mode with more than ugly graphics. And ugly to code for.
* Non upward compatible (FT own service '11' doesn't work anymore with minitel 1)
* A racket system. A lot of things can only be made via the minitel service in france. An easy way to get fast bucks for anyone that have captive customers, or any sort of monopoly.
The only real service provided by minitel is called 'minitel rose', and is basically pr0n related services. This earn an awful amount of money to France Telecom (even when FT was a _public_ company).
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.