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France Ending Minitel Service
New submitter pays-vert writes "On Saturday, France will turn off the Minitel service. A forerunner of the world wide web, Minitel provided news, online banking and, yes, porn via a chic plug'n'play terminal. The service remained massively popular for a while even after the rise of the Internet, but ultimately has lost out to technological innovation. 'About 400,000 of the machines are still in use across the country, but perhaps most affected will be Brittany, where the devices were developed, and where many farmers still depend on them. ... Internet service spread much more slowly in France than it did elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, largely because of the popularity of the Minitel, historians say. Only around the turn of the century did the Internet come to much of this soggy western region, an expanse of green that bulges out into the Atlantic Ocean. The Minitel was hugely useful to farmers. Realizing that the devices could save time and money, local agricultural organizations developed programs for farmers to, say, track pork prices, inform the authorities of animal births and deaths, or consult the results of chemical tests on milk.'"
Internet service spread much more slowly in France than it did elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, largely because of the popularity of the Minitel, historians say
Now we consult historians to find out about the spread of the internet? That makes me feel old :(
Minitel predates the web, but that is misleading. The internet/arpaneta was around long before the web, and long before freenet, so it is a forefunner to minitel.
we need historians to get informations about an only 30 year old technology?
not a good sign for human knowledge, 30 years are within this generation, not some long forgotten aeon...
What's most interesting about Minitel is not the "historical" origins 30 years ago, but the way the French Government kept subsidizing it up until 2012. It was already presque obsolete when AOL was on the rise, but the tax dollars just kept it going. Government isn't that bad at developing something new (NASA, nuclear power), but it does a pretty bad job of management if it decides to stay "in the business".
Gently reply
Man outside castle: Hey, you there! Do you think your lord would like an internet?
Man on battlements: Ah don't think he'll be interested. See, he's already got one. [whispers] Ah told zem we got one already [sniggers]
MOC: Can we see it?
MOB: No. [whispers to man next to him] Fetchez la vache.
MOC: RUN AWAY!!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
was easy billing of services: depending on a service's call number, several billing levels were available (from free to more than $10/min), and the user was aware of how much each number cost. That's the micropayment thingy the Internet never got right. I remember having to beg to Minitel guys to subsidize me when I was doing Web stuff for a TV station ^^
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
because it's political. Minitel lost out not because of technology but because of the world we live in. No government could handle that unless it was the most powerful country i.e. US i.e. world wide web.
My French connections used Minitel primarily as a dating service. One of my dad's friends had three girlfriends through his Minitel dating "site". The profiles were rather dedicated since these girlfriends all shared same previous boyfriends. Enfin, I will not go into detail - yes, French tend to go into those details already at the apéritif.
Until some time around 1997, exploring simple travel plans, booking and paying for them was a fucking nightmare for the rest of the world; they'd been doing it for more than a decade already in France, via a system which was very fast (remember those shitty 33.6K & X2 modems?) and very convenient. Standardised. Without pop-ups.
Germany's Post monopoly prevented this and instead buit the BTX system, designed to make profits, primarily for the Post (fmr. Telekom parent), and because phone costs were so high. getting on-line was a terribly expensive proposition in Germany until the Post monopoly was broken up.
Nooooooooooo! What will happen of 3515 ULLA? Disclaimer: I'm drunk.
you really don't know what you're talking about
So the effort hrere will be convincing farmers that an antiquated yet fairly reliable system that runs on proprietary hardware should be replaced by a totally reliable system that runs on open software and any hardware and will be continually upgraded for the forseeable future. Yeah, good luck with that.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I believe you where not around in 82, or didn't go to france in the 80s.
What France Telecom invented (probably by accident) is that under some circumstances you can "let go".
So they acctually accepted that other companies would make money on their network, they provided the terminal, the infrastructure and the billing but allmost all the rest where in the hand of a lot of various private company.
When the first "book shop on the internet" came out in the early 90s there where about 40 000 Minitel services and at least 5 active book shops.
US Videotel, based in Texas, tried it out in Houston and DFW. I worked for them for a while and it was actually pretty useful to get people who couldn't afford a computer "online". It was just a dumb b/w terminal with ANSI graphics and text services, but for many of us it was pretty nifty. The main competition at the time were Delphi and CompuServe which required a (>$100's) computer. The Mini-tel could be had for a nominal monthly fee.
"many farmers still depend on them. ... Internet service spread much more slowly in France than it did elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, largely because of the popularity of the Minitel, historians say. Only around the turn of the century did the Internet come to much of this soggy western region"
Seriously? Farmers depend on Minitel? I never saw that in my "soggy wester region", Normandy. Also, care to give citations for what I bolded out? Hell in the US there are still vast portions of the country very, very badly covered by high speed internet access or not at all which isn't true in France. Who are these "historians"?
Was this article written by a Texan rancher who still strikes out "French fries" on restaurant menus to write "Liberty fries"?
My
Sorry Minitel - I never knew you. But say hello to some friends of mine: BBS, Gopher, Usenet, and Telnet. All cool things at the time, all superceded by bigger and better. But at the time they were like magic.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I was born in Western France and I remember that Minitels started to die when modems became more common in France. Many people bought modems to have access to fax functions, as buying a fax machine was damn expensive at that time. In France, modems usually came bundled with minitel emulators, inciting buyers to not buy extra monthly cost for minitel rent to France Telecom. I remember making my scholarship applications for university on the Minitel for a couple of years until they had a decent Internet website. Everybody gave up on the Minitel already but terminals were still available around campuses just for this purpose. Then they saw less and less students queuing for the few number of terminals and flocking to the computer room, at a time where personal Internet access was not common yet. Web browser usability beats minitels phone-like menus a hundred folds. They then discarded the minitels. RIP minitel, you were part of my life and I will never forget you.
Je me rends!
One forgotten thing in these comments (or did I skip?) is, in an era just without internet, spending lots of time on semiporn chatting on Minitels appears to have raised so much money than it turned these service owners into billionnaires.
The current owner of Free, which is I believe the largest french ISP after the ex-state monopoly France telecom, started as a minitel porn service supplier. Then he just used his millions to switch to ISP.
Many french themselves have forgotten this, and here Free has quite a good aura today...
So, while I seriously doubt Minitel service was costing much to the state, it definitely raised huge amounts of silly guys' money into sex chat providers pockets.
These, are our present internet landlords here.
And there are people around that still think theyr work will better the country.
Herve S.
For some reason, I was thinking Minitel was the same as Teletext. It seems like the last vesteges of it are being phased out now, but it was an interesting service and quite common in some countries.
The French government should have realised in the 1970s that the beacon of the Free World (tm) the Good Old U S of A was soon to give us grateful peasents the internet and shouldn't have bothered trying to provide an extremely useful data service 15 years ahead of its time for its citizens. Because no competition means is a Bad Thing. Unless of course its the US govn. or company then its a different matter.
You know what, just fuck off you yankee prick.
As a French student, 10 ago, we were still spending time during our telecomunications class to study the X.25 protocol (the Minitel protocol covering the layers 3/4 in the OSI model) ...which was an aberration at the time when compared to the (much simpler, and much more useful) TCP/IP protocols that were used in the Internet. But it was the turn of the millenium, Internet was not that used in France (except maybe by the students, hardcore gamers and porn addicts) while the Minitel was the last remnant of French technology, even if it was losing ground in the main population in the battle against the
Anyway, I believe I still have nightmares, sometimes, waking only to scream "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, not the X.25". I guess that 's better than "Cauchy-Schwart theorem!", but only marginaly.
OP: "perhaps most affected will be Brittany, where the devices were developed, and where many farmers still depend on them."
Sorry, but that is what we Europeans call "bollocks". I was in Brittany two weeks ago, in a campsite in the middle of nowhere, and it was saturated in 3G/HSDPA mobile broadband. I drove all round the place, 3G everywhere. Decent stuff, too, was browsing BBC News at snappy speeds, even video worked fine.
Campsite I stayed in had Wifi on about a 4 meg connection, probably ADSL, middle of nowhere. Restaurants and cafes in villages and market towns, ditto. The "Domain de Kerlan" campsite I used last year even had wi-fi to *every* *single* *plot*. So stop this "farmers still depend on dumb terminals with 1.2 kilobit modems" bullshit.
France is not very big, only twice the size of the UK. It's not like the USA where there are thousands of miles of empty rural plains. It was dead easy to wire up the whole country for ADSL. That happened a decade ago. The furthest you'll ever get from a city of at least 50,000 people is about twenty-five miles, and I can't think of *any* part of France that is more than five miles from a village of at least 2,000 people.
What's more, French farmers are usually part of a local co-operative who bulk-buy engineering and technology gear at discounted rates (for example, they tend to club together to buy tractors or combine harvesters). I sincerely doubt there is any large farm that wants ADSL, or at least ISDN, that can't get it; French farmers are fscking *minted*.
"Many farmers still depend on Minitel". My arse.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Interesting.
I always saw the minitel as a technological leap forwards (the first data network targeted at the general public), and a terrible anchor that weighted us down and prevented most of us French people from moving to the Internet : that's the usual consensus about the impact of the Internet on the human beings that used/could have used it.
But I never looked at it from the interactions between the technological service provider and the business models relying on such new media.
I loved the time I spent on BBS's. One of the reasons is that BBS's that I visited had a message board which allowed you to communicate with other fellow geeks around you. Sure it wasn't as big and complete as Minitel but there was what I needed so that was fine (online games like L.O.R.D, message board with fidonet, files and more)
shouldn't have bothered trying to provide an extremely useful data service
Correct. Private BBSes were already on the rise in the 70s. There was no need for government action when the free market was already acting to meet customer demands.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Unless those BBS's were willing to provide their users with a terminal or computer for FREE to access their systems then your argument doesn't have a leg to stand on. The percent of the population of france in the late 70s who had a computer barely registered.
How many people on Slashdot were around during Minitel's heyday? Perhaps half of us? How many people on Slashdot are hearing about Minitel for the first time in this article?
I was very much around, and followed Minitel's development with interest. I've used Minitel on visits to France. It filled a need. It worked.
Lots of people at the time thought teletext was the way to go. In a sense it was, in the days when 1200 baud was considered a fast modem. Remember Prestel (U.K.)? Remember all the hype about Telidon (Canada)? And how little we have to show for it?
At one time all the ads in French magazines and stuff quoted Minitel codes, almost invariably 3615. Now they all have URLs.
...laura
In practice it is the relative efficiency of the business model that slowed down the move to internet. :-))...
I remember very well when I was offering internet on-line service development to french customers, many told me that they would wait until "The Internet" would come to its sense and offer a revenue share similar to the minitel...
(At least with them you could speak, the ones who believed that anyway Microsoft would offer a "better" solution never buyed anything
But is was a fun time :-)
Minitel was a success for many reasons
1) there was no alternative
2) the minitel terminal was free
3) lot of public services degree results, school inscriptions, white pages...
4) lot of company services where you pay by minute ( you pay on telephone bill )
Today's many companies would love to be able to have a minitel business model for their websites. Imagine an internet where you control what people do/read and you can make them pay for :you listen to music on somerandomglog.com you need to pay x.xx €-$-£
It's not well known, but Minitel, the French system, was deployed in the US. Local dial-up ports were available in most US cities. The system was run by Telecom France, and gave access to both lightly used US services and the full network in France. I used to have an account on it. There was no extra charge for communicating across the Atlantic, so the service was useful to anyone who had people to talk to in France.
Minitel had a delightful culture in some ways. People wrote poetry on the dating services.
You have absolutely no idea what Minitel was offering. You know how now, everyone has a www., and ads are frequently just attempts to get you to a website? Right around 1990, that's what the 3615 in the ads were - merely a way to get you to use their Minitel service.
BBS my ass. I know what those looked like, and there was absolutely nothing in them that could compete with the Minitel services.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Although a landline could go as high as 56 kbits, you usually got half of that. This was OK for text-rich pages. But totally inadequate for the graphics and video rich web of today.
One of the authors claims that the internet owes a lot to minitel. Not so much. There was a lot of user generated content before minitel. They were early on, true. But the internet got its start in 1969, not 1978. The world wide web (which sits on the internet) was proposed by Tim Berners Lee in a paper in March 1989. Before www, there was gopher, usenet, and a host of other online services (some of which have been killed, some abandoned, and some still around). Anyone innovating on the internet, without prior exposure to minitel were developing green field applications, and are in no way beholden to minitel for ideas or innovation. According to the article, that is anyone outside of France, Belgium or parts of Ireland. Having said all that, it was fledgling but better than anything else for a few years, better than the internet for a few years, matched the internet for a few years, slightly behind the internet for a few years, and has looked old and antiquated for a few years. Nothing annoys me more than going to a museum where some lunk head looks at an old mainframe computer, chuckles, and mutters something about his watch having more power than blah blah. Its all I can do to mutter that a modern (built this year) mainframe computer can wipe the floor with the blah blah computer on his desk. They still make these old things? No, its a new thing. "Well my new blah blah has a new blah chip, can these old things beat that?" No, the new ones have 10,000 of the newer blah chip, each of which is better than that old piece of blah on your desk. What do they need all that for? Stuff the piece of blah on your desk can't do. Oh, I didn't know. I assumed that innovation on big computers stops while innovation on small ones catches up, then you don't need the big old ones anymore.
It was also a wonderful tool to meet people.
I met my wife on the Minitel 17 years ago.
Since there was a double pricing (3614 was cheap, and 3615 was expensive), men had access to the 3615 part of meeting sites, while women had access to the 3614 part.
>>>there was absolutely nothing in them that could compete with the Minitel services.
Really? Minitel looked better than this? Doubtful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgH27p-FAM
PICS in case youtube doesn't work: http://orrtech.us/qlink/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Caribe
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm currently getting my PhD thesis funded by France Telecom / Orange, and am embedded into their R&D division.
The guys I work with are currently working on the spiritual successor to minitel, as 400,000 people want to maintain the ease of use of minitel (in fact most subscribers are from rural areas and elderly), so an internet based follow up is desirable. This is essentially just software and a support contract to turn a computer into an 'information terminal'.
This is not just a legacy system that goes away over night, no porting the last people away from it is quite a priority, as 400k customers is an important demographic.
So, quaint as minitel is in this day and age - it's also been in use for thirty years, and thus has dedicated followers.
Actually, I do know what I am talking about. I was there and then. Both in the USA and in France and Belgium during that period, before it and after it. I saw the history that you only read about. I was part of it. I have been working in computers since the 1970's.
Minitel is to be killed off completely -- I'm not sure about Gopher, but Usenet still has active (if low-participation) discussion groups, and there are still some Telnet services around.
Apathy Sucks, Nobody for President!
Minitel was simply a copy of Prestel, but with one addition which gave it staying power - French telecoms decided to use it to completely replace the telephone directory and directory enquiries, and issued a standard terminal to just about everyone. This is what gave it the market penetration which made it popular.
I should be numbingly used to such drivel, but it still amazes me.
You said that socialists don't mind if I think for myself ("socialists don't mistrust individuals thinking for themselves"), as long as I don't actually act on that thought ("They distrust individuals ACTING for themselves unchecked"). It's ok for me to not like broccoli, but I still have to eat it when the elite tell me it's better for me. That's real useful. Thank you for letting me use the inside of my head as long as you never see any outside manifestation of thinking independently. Shall I call you Lord, or Master, or Kind Sir, or just plain Smart One?
Oh, you probably think adding "unchecked" is cute and somehow justifies the elite guiding the unwashed. What a nice strawman argument! There's not a single libertarian or even anarchist I know of or have ever heard of you who thinks people should act unchecked. There's an old saying "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" which certainly is a check, even if the saying offends your sensibilities.
You know little about either socialists or libertarians. But go ahead, see, not only do I enjoy you thinking (if that is the right word) for yourself, I don't mind you acting on it, unchecked, here in slashdot or anywhere else.
Infuriate left and right
"I believe you where not around in 82, or didn't go to france in the 80s."
Then your belief system has nothing to do with reality. You're mildly amusing at best. I've been working in computers since the 1970's and was in France, Belgium and the USA during that time period and used the services under discussion. You are welcome to your delusions.
And you, like all statists who mistrust individuals, missed my point. If individuals have the same power as governments give themselves now to sue misbehaving corporations and fat cats, corporations and fat cats will not get away with what they do now, because their buddies won't cover their ass.
I know the answer already -- you hate individuals, you mistrust them, you don't like them, but more than anything else -- you are a statist and want the government to tell individuals what to do.
Why do you statists hate people so much?
Infuriate left and right