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Minitel Hits Twenty
An anonymous submitter writes "Minitel is now 20 years old, according to this article from BBC News: 'Calling Minitel a proto-internet may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not far off. Unlike the internet, Minitel is a closed network, based on the phone system of its owner, France Telecom. Using one of its prehistoric-seeming terminals, users can access a labyrinth of proprietary content, all of it determinedly low-graphics and designed for speed.' Slashdot has reported on Minitel before."
Calling Minitel a proto-internet may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not far off. ... all of it determinedly low-graphics and designed for speed.
All right, aspiring web developers and disgruntled dot-bomb employees. Your objective today is to modernize this archaic service: develop a functional implementation of Flash and JavaScript pop-under advertisements, then ensure that all original content is publicly inaccessible. Finally, schedule a decadent yacht party. We're going to party like it's 1999!
Do you like German cars?
What kind of taxes are levied against Minitel transactions, pray tell?
'Calling Minitel a proto-internet may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not far off'
What about Darpanet? Isn't that the true proto-internet given that it predates minitel and was a much larger network and, oh yeah, formed the backbone of the internet?
From the article:
One new venture for example, known as w-HA, is working on a scheme that will allow online payments to be made within two mouse clicks
Phew! For a second there, I thought they were in trouble.
"'Calling Minitel a proto-internet may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not far off."
It has been said that Al Gore saw one of these when he visited Paris, and it inspired him to create the Internet when he got home.
Thank you, France! For the fries, and now for the 'Net!
I don't get it. Why not offer web and email access via Minitel (lynx and pine, or equivalent)? It seems that FT have resisted doing this for a long time.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Minitel is trusted not just because it is an integral part of French life, but because its closed network is guaranteed virus-free and hacker-proof
Both famous last words.
Using one of its prehistoric-seeming terminals, users can access a labyrinth of proprietary content, all of it determinedly low-graphics and designed for speed.
:(
SO.... It's like the internet except old and no pr0n?
If people are truly disgruntled by the taxation and regulation of the internet, perhaps they should consider looking over our past more carefully as oppposed to striking off and starting a new internet. I'm curious wether-private or not- minitel could be used as an 31337 n00b fr33 internet alternative.
As an proud, God fearing, flag loving American, I hearby announce a US boycott against Minitel to punish France for its general cowardly, frogginess in the Iraqi affair. I will no longer use it to look up phone numbers or get train times.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated.
BTW, what the hell is an "Illegal Comment"?
I assume whoever wrote this never used Minitel, the darn thing is designed to keep you on line as long as possible so France Telecom can rake in more money
:-)
Many citizens of the United States refer to this service as "America Online."
Do you like German cars?
see here before modding as Troll.
Damned lameness filter always ruinging a good joke.
This is tedius news - other similar (& better, though YMMV) systems, like the UK's Prestel service were invented before this (Prestel was started 24 years ago in the 1970's).
The difference is, that unlike France's bizzare xenophonic-rooted obsession with the outdated Minitel, other large scale BBS systems have been shutdown because they have been rendered useless after the invention and subsequent uptake of the World Wide Web.
(ObNote: I used to work at Prestel On Line, the Internet provision arm of Prestel which was founded in the mid 90's).
I knew you could. Minitel must be a gold mine of anti-internet-patent prior art.
Johnny
Do you think Minitel may be slowing the rate of Internet takeup in France? I mean, why bother buying a computer when you already have this nice little Minitel terminal that does just about everything you need without any unnecessary complications?
OLPC Australia
> Minitel is now 20 years old so, what is its webpage? :P
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
...now will you please die?
The Minitel is an obsolete piece of technology. Yes, it was revolutionary twenty years ago. But it has slowed French innovcation down ever since. The sail has become an anchor.
Why is the Minitel still in use today? France Telecome still makes a significant profit from the overpriced service and has no intention to give it up. The Minitel's prime use is what we use the interenet for, yellow and white pages.
The interface isn't simpler, the boxes are ugly and unpractical, the service costs a fortune. I can't see why the Minitel couldn't be replaced by cheap, mass produced computers connected to the internet.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I am *so* moving to France, and won't be answering any questions about where my money comes from.
One that violates the rule of thermodynamics?
"Minitel is trusted not just because it is an integral part of French life, but because its closed network is guaranteed virus-free and hacker-proof."
Hmmm you just know thats asking for trouble.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Yes, but what kind of Doom III FPS can you get?
Just to tell you that the picture in the BBC article is somehow a bit out dated and that our french third wonder (after Sophie Marceau and la baguette) has been re-styled with the utmost "french touch" to suit even the highest standards of modern technological societies.
:)
Here is what is really looks like at this time: http://www.com1.fr/images/ph_atmax_iminitel.jpg
I wonder if we could boot a linux kernel out of this baby...
Using a Minitel as an UNIX text console (in French)
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I may be showing my age here... But QSD was great!
So when will the Internet be upgraded to support the same features?
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Check out www.i-minitel.com if you want to see what its "really" like. Maybe you will need a little bit of babelfish, but there is downloadable software for PC, Mac or Linux.
Can you finally use your nVidia in 8 color 24 x 40 mode . . . . .
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
A french friend of mine told me this is typically French: extremely centralised, top down content providing, closed system. In france, all power comes from the ministeries in Paris and the rest of the country is referred to as a kind of outfield. The idea of something as peer-to-peer and chaotic as the internet could never have been invented over there.
This service was called Ibertex. Required a 300bps modem to enter (lately 2400 were accepted woohooo) and I think it is still working (dial 031 anyone?)
May the source be with you!
Having lived in France during the introduction of the Internet, I remember many details:
:)
The Minitel is liek a BBS system, except that you got the terminal (screen and keyboard) from the phone company for cheap. There were (now it's declining due to the net) any kind of service that you could image. You thing pop-ups are bad? You haven't seen anything until you've seen a street of Paris filled with posters showing a barely clad woman and advertising some Minitel dating service.
For me the Minitel shows how even old people can embrace new technology if you make it easy for them. EVERYONE used the minitel, and companies set up Minitel servers before the concept of website was even imagined. We had chatrooms, forums (a la Slashdot) etc. Considering these were billed per minute, and billings varied from $0.2 to $1, it can get very expensive.
However having the machine at home costed you about $3-4 per month, not much considering what you could get. Most families that I know over there had a minitel, at least for using as a phone book (first 3 minutes of phone book browsing service were free).
However, it was (is) a real cash cow, so of course when the Net came along France Telecom was very reluctant to move away from this service. Which is a damn shame, because I'm sure they could have made a profit selling "Internet minitels", the same thing except with Internet access... however, with these no company can charge $1/minute, so, the move was not popular with companies either. There were some Internet phones, but at $500, they failed miserably.
Today I wish the service a quick death, because there's really nothing left there that cannot be done faster and more comfortably through the Internet (max connection speed for the minitel was, IIRC, 9600 bps, and only for some servers!). And you can recycle the devices: there's a lot of documentation of how the teletext terminal work, so you can easily hook up a network of those for whatever you want.
France was an innovator back then, but because they latched on their own system and failed to adapt, they were slow in adopting the Internet. The new generation, however, having grown up with minitel technology, was very quick to jump into the Net train. As a matter of fact, many French free webhosting services were created by guys who ran free BBS or inexpensive (the phone company always made money) Minitel servers back in the day!
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Does Minitel suffer from spam messages and pop-up ads, or has it avoided the plagues of the Internet?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
In the mid 80's I used to work during the summer in a bank in France. When suddenly all the computers went dead. No more network. The reason for this was that the minitel and the bank network were using the same lines and the minitel suddenly had a surge in communication. Why ? Because the first "minitel rose" services had appeared. The minitel rose was some rather expensive porn chat services and they became very popular.
So there you go. Internet, minitel, same thing.
Plus ca change, plus c'est pareil.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The article seems to imply that prior to the internet, none but the Frenchies had this kind of information service available to them. I dunno about anyone else here, but for me, the functional forerunner of the internet, and what I used well into 1999 (even though I started using the internet around 1991) were BBSes. There were also paid information services like PC-Link, Apple's eWorld, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL... some being around since the early 80s, other latercomers.
Of course, the percentage of American households calling up these BBSes and commercial ISes was probably lower than households which use their Minitel box with any sort of regularity, but I just felt the need to point out another thing that served as a functionally proto-internet.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I think it's a case of being right too early. The same thing happened in the US with cell phones. The early adoption led to a puzzle of incompatible standards and huge investment in obsolete networkds slowing down the adoption of modern, high-speed wireless telecom.
Fred Mora
In fact, Minitel and BBSs have quite a bit in common. The striking difference is that most BBSes were single-tasking (only one connection at a time) and many of them were not networked. So, they were local phenomena, since nobody wanted to incur the cost of long-distance phone calls.
The Minitel, in contrast, was/is centralized (like many things in France), thus commercially viable, long before the Internet got there.
The French, by the way, were ahead in many things. They had their fast train TGV (train a grande vitesse) a decade before the Germans did as well. But French R&D has never quite managed to deploy their technologies world-wide.
The Minitel was not archaic *back then*. It was progress, and an interesting social experiment.
For example it shows that whoever says that "maturing people have difficulty grasping new technology" is speaking out of his/her ass, since the Minitel was used by senior citizens, and they loved it (still today!), showing that it's not the technology itself that is the problem, but the required learning curve.
However, the thing is that 20 years later companies/organizations/government offer some services via Minitel *only*. A service, by the way, that could perfectly well given over the Internet (for example, getting your own grades from school).
Holding to a previous outdated innovation (outdated precisely because better technology was created from it), in a clear attempt to make money, is nothing more than the RIAA business model. Seriously.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Hmmm... seem to remember that some 'comm' program (that's what we called them then) that I used back in the BBS days had Minitel emulation.
I can't remember the name of it now, though. Was it maybe Telix? (I seem to remember this was produced by a French company)
My journal has hot
The "pop-ups" were posters that popped up in almost every streetcorner in France. Minitel access was obtained by dialing "361x" and a code (x, ranging from cheaper to more expensive, went usually from 2 to 8).
Most of these posters were for dating chat rooms. One of the most famous was even named "3615 cum". And that's not even a "porn" chatroom (there were, but usually were "3617").
As for spam, it was in form of "snail" mail. Fortunately, there is in France regulation that allows consumers to opt-out from *all* mail spam *at once* by writing to a special organization (I even learned the address for it in one of the "spammy" ads!). You won't receive any mail advertisement after that!
By the way, here's a Java minitel emulator.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
The minitel is actually a text terminal + a modem.
(try to make popupders on a text terminal)
The servers were exclusively referenced and billed by France Telecom.
The important word, here, is BILLED : the BIG advance is that you were able to bill some content. e.g. if you connect to a server, your phone bill will have that price included.
So, whoops : no need for popupders !
As far as spam is concerned, you don't get spam on the web, you get spam on email. Which wasn't available as a service.
Can we slashdot it yet?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
If the French like, trust and enjoy Mintel what's the issues? It's not like internet access and Mintel are mutually exclusive.
Now it would seem to me that if FT can hold on with Mintel long enough, and make it available to PDAs and the new generation of mobile phones, they could find a whole new lease of life in Mintel.... Suddenly the bandwidth optomised, "primitive" graphics might seem really useful on small displays, where a lot of traditional internet content isn't viable.
It had more than a passing similarty to Ceefax, Prestel *was* a version of the Ceefax service, developed in the early 70's. The BBC went on to produce ORACLE, and the Post Office went on to produce Prestel, the all used the same protocol (BTS).
However, readers should note that Prestel was not simply like what people think of as being 'Ceefax' today, Prestel could display on much higher spec'd terminals, you could download and install software via Prestel, and perfom transactions, and use mail.
You've got think, the first telex system was invented in the UK and we don't really bother with it any more (apart from a few sputtering pages displaying the latest news headlines in hotel lobbies), that should be a sign it's day is at an end.
As for being xenophobic, well this standard was used in many countries (I'm not sure how many, but more than 10), and in any case that comment rather misses the point that the UK is not clinging to this service but rather actively seeking to replace it (with a new much improved solution). It's supported for legacy reasons (i.e. lots of older televisions with out digital decoders still find it useful).
The French are still trying to find new ways to use Minitel, even building new hardware, simply because it's 'their' system.
If you don't get it I won't bother explaining it. Just look around some other European countries and see how many of them are still clinging to similar desperately antiquated systems, *sarcasam* oh your right, the French arn't really xenphobic, it's all in our heads, they don't really go around hassing web site providers and educational establishements because they don't have a high enough percentage of French content, we just imagined it. *end sarcasam*
The best comparison is to the old VideoTel network that was in the late 80s/early 90s. The machines used were dedicated cheap terminals that a person could buy and then with a subscription, access the videotel network which was a collection of BBSes and services around the country.
They used a special modem (I think it was a 1200 baud, but it couldn't connected with a normal 1200) and has special command keys.
VTel boxes are still being used in some places. A few years ago I had a relative who took a take-home defensive driving class that required you to log on to a VAX server using a VTel box to take the required tests.
-
Although directory lookups via Minitel are indeed popular, they're also free (and available via public Minitel terminals at any post office).
Few on Slashdot will be surprised to hear that the real money-maker (unfortunately, from my POV), is porn. Wherever you go in France you'll see posters that say "3615 {female name}" Entering that code at a Minitel terminal will connect you to the Minitel equivalent of a phone sex line. At least, I think that's what happens. I was in France as a Mormon missionary, so not surprisingly, I never tried it. But posters were literally everywhere, and you'd regularly hear radio ads for 3615 this and 3615 that.
While there are other uses for a 3615 prefix, cybersex was far and away the use most often advertised.
I'd love to have minitel and not the
"proprietary web" the cell phone guys
keep trying to shove down our throats.
Don't you mean Freedom Telecom?
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Anyone else had huge phone bills due to RTEL ?
:)
RTEL was _the_ thing that made me love Minitel.
And it was the headquarter of most Atari/Amiga demo crews
*SAL 2
#]#O#HMinitel rules#I#L#\
{{.sig}}
on a side note the French govornment were less than chuffed with the minitel system when paris based studeents used it to organise their rallys, which almost inevitably lead to riots.
this is of course, somewhat offtopic.
-Drew
The French have a pretty impressive list of high-tech ventures in recent times. They have implemented chip technology in their credit cards (since the fraud was getting out of hand). They made the Concorde with the British. They created TGV - high-speed trains that compete with airline traffic on short- to mid-range flights. The Minitel is old tech now, but I bet it was an inspiration to AOL.
;)
Not bad for a bunch of frog-eaters
Stop the brainwash
"RTC"s were free local Minitel servers made by individuals.
:)
Sure, there were not a lot of possible concurrent access (because phone lines were expensive for the server owner), but RTCs were really fun, especially because all people were living in the same area.
With some previous other RTC freaks, I'm trying to make a meeting of former RTC users in Paris. If you were addicted to RTC-ONE, JEF, OXYGENE, APOGEE and other RTCs, and if you live in Paris, please drop me a little mail at rtc@pureftpd.org . It would be really kewl to meet each other to remember the good'ol time
-ChrYsaLiS.
{{.sig}}
When I was 14/15 years old... meaning 16 years ago, I use to use our minitel at home like crazy.
I was members of different groups, add my Amstrad, and then Amiga, was hacking on Minitel for some fun. It wasn't actually _that_ secure.
We discovered some flaws and I was using the minitel to communicate 'secretly' with other people of my group, having also mail functionnality, we were to leave ourself mails to retrieve at some other time, actually it was very similar to IRC to talk, that was so cool, be able to communicate with people all other France, and even with some other X25 networks by hacking into it, communicate with other companies and other friends for free... that was the good time...
Actually thinking about it, that the minitel is so old (20years), maybe some of the technology used for it is old enought so it could be use to dismiss some recent patents? Because the minitel was kind of a browser, with a keyboard as the navigation interface.
Um, so that's a Troll is it?
So did the UK not develop Prestel then?
And was it not launched in the 1970's?
And did I not used to work for Prestel?
I'm sorry you seem to have been outsmarted by a search engine.
I belive the phrase that's apt is something about you being replaceble with a very small shell script...
MiniTel was standard in France when a few non-french were still fiddling about with the C64 and 4 Mailboxes across the atlantic. Shure that HW was rugged and not very flexible and that modem was superslow, but it was a standard.
And its acceptance was much broader than that of the Inet today. *Everybody* would use it. For chatting, billing (payment via phonebill) and offline communication via bb and the like. The boxes were small compared to todays PCs and everyone with more than 2 braincells and a little bit of common sense could operate them instantly. There were public MiniTel booths everywhere and even pubs, clubs and restaurants would have one or two. Remember, this came something like 15 years before there where Internet Cafe's.
In terms of "being online" France really was ten years ahead of time. At least.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Because it it totally silent and takes about 1 second to boot, everything included. Something that, up to now, no PC offers. People do not like "evolutions" that lead to losses of time or comfort. Time is money. Comfort helps happiness.
What could replace successfully the Minitel (R) now would be a 1989's NEC-Ultralite inspired subnotebook PC : a 256MB MemoryStick or anyting similar as "disk", 128 MB or so of main memory, powered by Linux/KDE (and never powered off; no need to, as no mechanical disk or fan would be involved. The question is not whether it will be done. It is just when. I guess Wi-Fi was the right thing to wait for.
Until something competitive in terms of silence and speed of boot is available, there is no reason why the Minitel will have to be unused. Remember the NAPLPS flop in the united states, which demonstrated that slowness and bad reaction times do not pay.
>> France Telecom still makes a significant profit from the overpriced service and has no intention to give it up. The Minitel's prime use is what we use the interenet for, yellow and white pages.
There is no such thing as "overpriced service", as long as competition is free. I do not see any objection in making profit in a free market either, by the way. Do you?
Due to european directives, French telecommunications are now totally open to competition (I think there are half a dozen of operators in France, and more are welcome).
Competition and survival of the fittest are the keys in the PC/Minitel consumer choice too : powering on a whole PC just to get a phone number is clearly overkill plus underperformance : before even your PC ends booting, the Minitel user will already have you connected to your correspondent
Remember this nice drawing from the 70's : "what the user is asking for; what the programmer is proposing;... what should have been done from the beginning".
However, something that will clearly have to be changed in the Minitel business model is the time-only billing, which induces some information provides to make their sites slow on purpose. But displaying the billing cost in real-time (on the Minitel, you do that by pressing "Sommaire" when you connect) will help wiping out misbehaving sites thought simple darwinian selection.
I worked in Paris in the early 1990s and set up a system whereby our AS/400-based parts ordering system (for Molex Corp) was made available to our customers over Minitel, using some sort of Gateway PC solution. It was cheap, easy and reliable, and the clients loved it. A friend of mine worked on Minitel systems in Ireland around the same time, but Minitel never really took off there.
You're absolutely right. I have forgotten how slow the thing was. I browsed around for new offerings, and it seems that now it is updated ("i-minitel", maybe to suggest it's like the internet). However, it still has the same pricing and is only accessible via modem. Thus no international use is possible (I tried, but FT's network won't allow it). :-(
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Yep, when I had my first linux machine, in 92 (that was kernel 0.98), one of the first thing I did was to connect it's serial port on my Minitel so I could save an control what was happening on the minitel (automatic dialing to retrieve information).
But the other GREAT usage for the minitel is that I was able to use that as a debugging TTY when I was programming. Imagine that, I had 'dual' display on my Linux machine back in 1992.
The TVs aren't 'CeeFax' capable. They are Teletext capable, and the BBC transmit CeeFax using Teletext.
TeleText has two forms, the old one in which the TeleText data is transmitted in the scan lines at the top of analogue television pictures. Capable TVs then takes those lines and decodes them into the pages you get to read. For digital TV e.g. digital cable with a set top box, etc the teletext data is added to the mpeg4 data that comes in, and it gets decoded by the set top box, so no it won't necessarily go away in 2010 when analogue disappears. By then other prettier looking interactive services will likely have taken over.
Bit of background. Teletext consists of a 40x25 text display, with a special character set consisting of alphanumeric characters and some special block graphics, both of which can be displayed in 8 colours, with 8 flashing colour combos - black,red,yellow,blue,cyan,magenta,white. You could also create double height text by placing character 141 before it on two consecutive lines. It was in the days of 1200bps,etc modems much quicker to download and display than ANSI text, so was very popular for BBS / viewdata systems such as Prestel in the UK.
Every Acorn computer bar the Electron and Atom had Mode 7, which was teletext. It was great as it only used up 1k of screen memory. By adding a teletext adapter, such as the ones Morley, Watford Electronics,etc used to sell, you could feed CeeFax, Oracle, etc pages into the computer.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Steve Jobs saw a Minitel terminal in France and was inspired by its design. He took the handle concept on top, which made the terminal easy to carry, and used it in the Macintosh. See a photo at http://www.com1.fr/~pficheux/xtel/images/minitel.j pg or http://www.ravet-anceau.fr/Minitel.gif
Once again, the Yankees took all the credit for true Frog creativity.
Be careful. For some unknown reason, those french people mostly use FRENCH language instead of just plain, simple English as any normal human being would. Probably some kind of snobbishness, I guess.
Interesting comment about Minitel's retro character based UI. Sound rather similar to the range of *nix's terminal based applications. Despite the GUI there is always the large number of aficionados to those 30 years old technology!
hmm - have you ever heard of "projection"?
YOU FAIL IT!
What @madeus says is that the brits have much better technology than the french and bigger cojones too. Now wait for him to sing Jerusalem.
Mwahahaha... lol
The Compu-Serv Informaiton Service started
about 4 years prior (1979) to minitel
and, in that time frame, was conducting
local (Columbus, Ohio) experiemnts with
delivery via cable.
At its peak, around 1997, there were more than six million terminals in use, and payments worth about $750m passed through the system...
I bet it's more than $750m, since there's a market where the money isn't transfered online. (eg. prostitution and dealing illegal drugs)
At least as of 5 years ago, FT had lost money on Minitel for each and every year that it was operational. Some content providers were making a profit (the porn providers, if other /. comments are to be trusted) but FT required life support from the government from day one.
Happy birthday and all, but how do you say "pork-barrell politics" in french?
--
Are their headquarters near those of Minitrue or *shiver* Miniluv?
Canada had a similar system back in the mid to late 70's that had interactive kiosk. The systems were mainly in school libraries and some shopping malls. It was pathetically slow and mostly textual output.
On dit "Military Industiral Complex".
Eisenhower didn't speak French.
Speaking of which. Whatever happen to teletext?
Minitel is as a good demonstration of what the world would be without the internet and it's open philosopy. Minitel's intelligence is all in the network, and all of it's publications are tightly controlled by a central authority. They did a fine job, arguably as good as could be done this way. While many useful servcices can be offered, they miss out on the blessings of liberty. Even under tight controls, the thing has evolved in ways they did not expect. We know that evolution is stunted from the services that people have invented for the web. The closest thing we have to that control here is M$ and their death grip on their platform. The world wide web is not only difficult to use under their naked browser, it's dangerous. Free browsers work better at getting the content you are intersted in while protecting the privacy and eyballs of the user. The less central control that's had in electronic publishing, the better off we all are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
While I can say that Paris is a wonderful place, you are not much of a hacker if you have to go there to break into their computers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wish someone could build a similar network in the US. An 8 or 16 bit machine powered by a GUI like Contiki or OpenGEM
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
minitel, concorde, TGV...
When are these weasels going to stop innovating (thats bill's job) and got to war alongside the US coalition(tm)? Preferably to beat the sh@t out of defenseless tiny little countries with trailors that could have been used to make WMD. (If our companies had sold them the ingredients and optional equipment)
realkiwi
When I was in university in France around 1991-1994, I would sometimes use a Minitel 1b in 80x24 vt100 emulation mode to log on to the school's vax (they didn't have Ethernet in dorm rooms yet, but the PBX offered serial line logins).
Believe me, you don't want to run Emacs at 1200 bps downstream...
I used my Minitel 2 (which had a 9600 baud RS 232 link and a 80 columns mode) as a text terminal on my Amiga 2000.
:-)
If I remenber correctly, from a shell on the main screen, you can launch a shell and attach it to the serial port. You can then use AmigaDos commands from the minitel (like a VT on a Unix/Linux machine) and keep the control of your Amiga even if a graphic app locked the graphic screen.
Cool
This is the same country that rejects genetically engineered crops. They want to remain in the past. No wonder this old technology still exists.
Yes that sounds exactly like the CeeFax service in UK (I wonder if Holland were one of the companies to use it or if they had their own service?).
;-), especially when you only have 4 TV channels in the country (as was the case at the time).
:-). I wonder who thought that up...
It has basically news, some local events (cinema listings), forecast, horoscopes, share price information, newsletters, jokes, that kind of thing. In the pre-www days (when Gopher and BBS's were all the rage) there used to be quite a few online magazines and jokes and kids stuff, and a few online quizzes, which have died out (they were really quite good at the time).
The service was entirely non ineractive, there were a few quizzes and things, where you could press a button depending on what you thought the answer was (Red, Green, Yellow or Blue, buttons you will see on almost every UK TV set to this day, as they are also useful for Ceefax/Teletext's digital sucessor, which is a bit more interactive and renders a bit like IE 3.0). These systems used a bit of 'URL trikery' to achive this though (pages are refered to with three digit numbers, not URLs, but you get the idea).
e.g. Page 100 for the index, page 200 for News, page 121 for 'TV: Now and Next' (followed by a list of channels). For the benifit of those who've never seen it the screen can be opaque on appear super-imposed on the TV image (ala TiVo, but as if the text was rendered by some not much more powerful than an Intellivision).
I remeber I used it for something stupid a couple of times, people could log onto the Gamesmaster BBS in London and go into a chat room, then the conversation from that chatroom was avalible super-imposed on the screen in real time all over the country (as with close captioning), via the Subtitles IIRC (most UK handsets also have a button marked 'Subtitles' which is page 888 of the Ceefax/Telext service). This was early 90's I think.
Typing on a computer in real time and watching what you typed come up on the TV where millions of people would be able to see it was amazingly cool (though I think about 10 people probably saw it
Ah memories (and a stupid hack wasted on many
Back in the Before Time, when giants walked the earth and we computed by candlelight using steam-powered PCs (ca. 1988) Minitel briefly came to America.
A French company, CTL, distributed emulator software on BBSes and invited people to log on for free. I remember the first time I realized I was chatting with someone in France I was blown away. I lived in the NYC area and local Minitel users even got together for Minitel parties at bars in Manhattan a few times.
Computer Sciences Corp. even planned to bring Minitel to America and I attended one or two seminars for potential server operators. Nynex (now Verizon) was climbing aboard too, with a slew of services. A colleague and I even planned to publish a magazine for server operators.
Alas, it was all over very quickly. Most of us migrated to a service operated by a company called Quantum Computer Services. They did offer email although at first PC users and Mac users couldn't send email to each other.
Quantum Computer Services is still around, but it's now known as AOL Time Warner.
Insert witty sig here.
"Minitel is trusted not just because it is an integral part of French life, but because its closed network is guaranteed virus-free and hacker-proof."
Sounds like a challenge
Something similar happened with the telephone. France really jumped in the bandwagon of mass telephone wiring around 1974. Among other things, it allowed France to have a fully temporal (rather that spatial) and digital fiber-optic (rather than analog copper) wiring. Technology decisions are similar so decisions in SimCity : you have to choose between being right for today or right for tomorrow. Everybody has to.
As a consequence the Asynchronous Transfer Mode originated in France. As well as the wavelet technology leading to the JPEG2000 standard. These should make some rather positive contributions to the world.
Considering car technology in the '60s as well as civil aircraft technology in the '90s, it would be interesting to think again about who was somehow late on who in making the best technology decisions. Concerning Airbus, the maket has chosen (showing among other things that having German and French people collaborating is a poor idea in war-time, but a great one in peaceful periods.
Trying to make things too fast may also lead to harmful side effects, as myopic space telescopes, exploding space shuttles, and a number of unused planes stored uselessly in the Mojaves desert as a consequence of hazardous deregulation :o(
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On the other hand, the Minitel was a handy tool to break in a poorly conceived UNIX server : you just had to send a "BREAK" character from it (doing it from its PC interface, as only the second generation Minitel 1B had VT1xx compatibility mode), and if the application developer had been careless, you had a shell at your disposal.
A lot of hackers developed then what was called as "brasseurs" : computers that you could call from a 3613 line (called party paying the cost!) and that would dial a TRANSPAC 3614 or even modem 3615 line from the hacked computer. There were even systems allowing to switch from one minitel server to the othet via a hot key sequence. As a result, computer security concerns were quite high here in 1987 : the CNET of Lannion had the surprise to receive a 3 billion francs (457000 euros!) phone line bill from their mother company, France Telecom :o)))
Pretty nice other things were done. For instance in 1987 a 40-users chat server on a 386/20 running MS-DOS (using 2 Addiciel 68000-based intelligent X25 cards) when the competition still used 40 times more expensive UNIX machines.
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Only on Minitel can you try to buy the almost impossible to get tickets for the Roland Garros tournament. No Internet. And yet, they are always sold out (you can also send a signed check by snail mail together with a form, but they usually send you the check back with an excuse for not being able to sell you the tickets, since they are sold out)...
According to IBM in 1978, 1 $ of investment was needed by them to generate 1 $ of revenue. The 19.8/51 ratio of the Minitel does not seem to have been that bad compared to their data. Which is probably why IBM's Lou Gertner signed a co-development agreement with France Telecom' Michel Bon in the 90s (I do not know what came out of it, by the way).
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François Lagarde's Medical Server (SM, in French) is worth mentioning.
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Under the determination of somebody called Annie Sidier, some Minitel service providers even agreed to open 1 or 2 "free" lines for deaf people, as a given sequence allowed to identify the "D" minitels.
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Before that was something much, much earlier.
In 1973, after a couple of years of hard work, Lee Felsenstein (BSEE from University of California at Berkeley) and the Berkeley group called Resource 1 established "Community Memory".
Terminals open to the public were scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and connected to a mainframe donated by a computer company called Tymeshare. Read more about these developments in the article at
http://madhaus.utcs.utoronto.ca/local/internaut/c
You can also read about Community Memory in Steven Levy's book "Hackers".
Say prodigy or even *gasp* *shock* *horror* the early America Online?
I remember Prodigy on my 386 with my blazing 2400 baud modem and it's proprietary information optimized for slow connections.
According to the description, "pre-historic seeming terminal", "optimized for speed", and what not it sounds like a French prodigy or AOL.
Before the internet became a public forum and was still military and academia.
The people had BBSes and the corps had proprietary nets. I think they should keep their proprietary nets if they want to control content, instead of trying to control the internet.
Yeah, yeah, cost is an issue, but if you want control, you should have to pay!
It was truly revolutionary to me. Well not quite as by that time I already had a DEC home terminal which allowed me access to the extensive DECNET VaxNotes community.
But believe me, going to live in France from Britain in the late 80s, Minitel was a revolution in communication. Who knew the Web would explode like it did back then.
Heh, even back then what did we use it for:
(1) An expensive telephone directory
(2) booking train tickets
(3) Pr0n and on-line dating...
In 1973, after a couple of years of hard work, Lee Felsenstein (BSEE from University of California at Berkeley) and the Berkeley group called Resource 1 established "Community Memory".
Terminals open to the public were scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and connected to a mainframe. The terminals were donated by a computer company called Tymeshare.. Read more about these developments in the article at http://madhaus.utcs.utoronto.ca/local/internaut/c
You can also read about Community Memory in Steven Levy's book "Hackers".
To suggest that AOL was "copying" the French is laughable. And yes, the French are still cowardly frogs.
If we compare the Minitel to the Internet, we should understand the different evolutionary paths they took.
Minitel started with the idea of providing service to ordinary people. There were similar projects in other countries, all were pretty much built on the paradigm of dumb terminals, a centralized data switch and servers. Note that this paradigm assumes that services are something that companies and organizations provide, not individuals.
What made the Minitel success, was that it was provided for free or very cheaply to customers. I don't see any other difference when compared to other less successfull projects in other countries.
The Internet took a completely different evolutionary path. We can pretty much say that the Internet as we now know it was not really designed, it just happened. The focus of the development work was initially very much in the infrastructure protocols and the only service was connecting computers. After TCP/IP was standardized the focus moved to applications and their protocols. The actual services were lagging behind the technology that was underneath. Many people even considered that an application is the same thing as a service.
At the time Minitel was introduced, it would have been impossible to provide same kind of service with the added cost of TCP/IP infrastructure. However Minitel was an evolutionary close end.
This approach to service vs. infrastructure can be seen in Gopher and WWW. Gopher was built in Minnesota just to get some information on the network easily. The data format was based on directories and ASCII files. Very simple, very efficient and in the early 1990's Gopher was running hot. WWW was a system only used by physicist and I remember telling people that Gopher is good and there is no way people are going to start formatting their sensible ASCII files with those funny little tags.
While the WWW also happened instead of being a visionary design for an international information network, it provided a pretty good balance of multimedia features, de-centralization, simplicity and eye candy, combined with flexibility and a growth path. Note that some aspects of the original design, like the annoitation servers, have practically disappeared.
If we want to learn something from this, it is that on the short run the service itself wins, on the long run the infrastructure that can evolve wins.
kiravuo
The actual statement is "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which is a whopper since the Internet was around before Gore got involved.
The site you gave "perpetuates the crap" that Gore was not lying: http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm
Note that they spin Gore's taking credit for creation of the Internet as a taking credit for promoting the Internet. Sorry, there is a big difference.
Also, they include totally irrelevant quotes by those who claim that Gore helped the Interent long after its creation as support to the idea that he created it.
Traub said: "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
Yes, we will see and end once Gore's defenders admit that his taking credit for creating it are totally false. As long as the lie is defended, the cheap shots are deserved.
Fuck you brit bastard! Start driving on the proper side of the road first! Bof! Chiraq, the chief cheese monkey, admitted recently that we drive better than you onion selling nonces.
Been using the minitel quite a lot when I was living in France (first 25 years of my life).
... That beats any PC with ADSL flat. Actually, I still do it when I m in France (every year or so) and want to get a number: if I m on the PC, with a minitel at arms reach distance, I ll prefer to switch on the minitel rather than go to another workspace or popup another browser tab.
The thing isn t technically so bad, and make a darn good serial tty to help save the day (when X gets naughty-crashy).
The drama of minitel is that it was paid by ticks, thus "site" designers were making interfaces that would make you waste as much time as possible before you got to the promised info.
Yet, the gizmo is still the best way to search the yello (and white ! ) pages in France. The service is free (as in free wine), the machine is up and online in less than 6 seconds, etc