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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."
The difference is that Minitel has been introduced in most French families by the mid-80s (the terminal itself was free and gave free access (for 3 minutes actually) to a few services such as the French white-pages and yellow-pages).
Regarding technology, the Minitel includes an asymetrical half-duplex modem: 1200 bps in downstream, 75 (!) bps in upsteam. But an interesting particularity was that it could be reversed to get 75/1200 instead of 1200/75.
The minitel-1 included a 40 columns black & white screen, with an extended charset that was heavily used to simulate graphism!
Later, faster models were indroduced (9600 bps), including color-screen and 80 columns mode.
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
Why not offer web and email access via Minitel
:) to dial a regular PC BBS and have the same feature with many improvements, In fact, unlike in the US, in France you have to pay for all local calls. So BBSes that allowed you to download your mail and reply offline were a great life-saving service (for the life of your wallet :) ).
Web was impossible because the Minitel was essentially a text terminal (VT100 IIRC). Graphics were achieved by combining special characters into shapes... and downloads were very slow. Even typing had delays!
However, e-mails were perfectly possible. But it was up to the company/BBS to provide the service. Some did, although at that time it was cheaper (for somebody in the know
The ENIAC Demo Competition
France's bizzare xenophonic-rooted obsession with the outdated Minitel
...) is that the minitel worked and was VERY popular. Probably more people used the minitel than prestel and BBS put together.
I am not sure what's xenophobic about that. Oh, maybe your remark is.
The point of the minitel is that it makes money! Money, money, money! Shall I capitalize it? MONEY!
You are a TV company and broadcast a stupid game. You want people to phone to register for the game (you make money from phone calls). Can people register through the Web? No. You don't make money from the web (a little from ads, but not enough). You provide a minitel service: you make people pay. Easy.
The difference between the minitel and other similar systems (Prestel, BBS,
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
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
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.
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.
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I don't know quite where you'd find the news or weather, but dialing into the ARPANET 30 years ago was just a matter of knowing the phone number and having a terminal and modem. There was no security on the TAC (terminal access controller, what might be called a "modem pool"). There were a couple systems at MIT that allowed guest access, and if you managed to connect there you could request an account and most likely get it.
Open TACs and systems with guest accounts existed into the early 80s, when a few people started knocking on the wrong doors and DARPA (and eventually MIT) cracked down. But they're how I first got on the ARPANET back in 1977
But, given the price they charged, I think they didn't even mind that much when people abused their system to get shell...