Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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
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
So when will the Internet be upgraded to support the same features?
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
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
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
Can we slashdot it yet?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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*
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.
And IIRC, the making pots of money part was an added extra to Minitel. The reason why France Telecom (then part of the French govt) introduced it was that they worked out it would be cheaper to set up the service and *give* a terminal to all subscribers and then make them do their directory enquiries for free through it than print phone books for the whole population.
A bit of imagination that British business and the British govt just don't seem to have any more.
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.
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
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
Not a good example.
:)
This service is extremely ugly and bad designed
Videotex is way more powerful that what you can see here. Every character, including graphical ones can be redefined (8x12 dots), and latest minitels can also display jpeg images with full colors.
There are also plenty of tricks to speed up things (like using a lot CAN), and to make things look better (like overlapping double-sized characters that produces nice chrome effects). This service uses none.
{{.sig}}
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?
--
Actually, the Minitel is just a terminal with an internal (1200 bps) modem. I've used my Minitel to connect to my university mainframe, mostly to read my mail when I was on holiday.
/etc/inittab, and eventually /etc/gettydefs!
/etc/termcap and /usr/share/terminfo, you will find a few "minitel" entries.
Some people have connected their Minitel to their Linux machine. A (simple) custom cable needs to be soldered, and then all that needs to be done is to edit
The Minitel is more or less VT100-compatible, with some custom escape sequences to handle eight(?) colors (shades of gray on most models) and semi-graphical characters.
Have a look in