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.'"

Comments

Re:[...], historians say

[Anonymous Coward]

We need historians to keep track of certain causes and effects of that 30 year old technology. It's really not something that your average network engineer is good at.

Re:[...], historians say

[ColdWetDog]

What would you call them? Journalists? Perhaps - there certainly are journalists that write about things several decades ago. But that sort of time frame IS history. It is long enough ago that one has time to gather information about it from many times and try to synthesize something resembling 'the truth'. It is a long enough time that many people forget both the event and the lesson.

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?

Yeah it's history and now please, off my lawn.

Going down kicking and screaming

[retroworks]

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".

Re:Going down kicking and screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that it was working just fine and the population liked and used it will be ignored for the brief moment that your comment is read.

Re:Going down kicking and screaming

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While it isn't a terribly big surprise that, in France, the subsidization happened to be a directly state matter, one should really keep in mind the broader context:

Minitel was, to no small degree, integrated into the telco infrastructure of the day(not just 'placed on top of it, because it has to be on top of something', like the ad-hoc BBSes or the eventual internet. And, unfortunately, telco(especially, but not exclusively, wireline telco) is one of the worst industries in the contemporary world when it comes to severely dubious state support. Whether it be the overtly state-owned and schlerotic monopoly telco companies, or the 'regulated'(ha, ha, ha) oligopoly-with-regionally-monopolistic-characteristics that passes for a 'free market' in telecommunications services, telcos worldwide historically(and frequently to the present day) are up to their bloody eyeballs in the worst sorts of state tie-ins, whether honestly labelled as such or not.

Had some of the 'future of the telephone' stuff that Bell was always making videos about in the 60's ever actually been executed, it likely would have been in exactly the same place.

Really, that's the thing that makes the internet more interesting: Not because it developed in a situation of more enlightened telcom policy(it basically didn't); but because Ma Bell was too caught up in her own line-switched rentseeking circlejerk to notice it before it had grown substantially...

Re:of course

[magic maverick]

Except the WWW was created by an Englishman while at CERN (on the border of France and Switzerland). The domain system may well be controlled by the US Govt. (Dept. Commerce, -> ICANN) by the WWW is not. If that makes sense.

And it was hardly political either. Minitel lost out because they stopped innovating, because they were not truly global, and most importantly, because they were not open. To get a service on Minitel required approval, it was just another walled garden, like the various USA options which also died (though earlier). Minitel lost to openness, and the ability for anyone to join without approval from a monopoly corporation.

Re:The dead past

[C_amiga_fan]

So basically government interference & protectionism of (1) their old 70s technology Minitel monopoly and then (2) the 90s/2000s-era Telecom monopoly hindered innovation and slowed the growth of web usage in France. Sounds like a prime example of whyt government should not interfere with the free market's natural processes (except basic workers' rights protections).

Yes, obviously Minitel was a monopolistic mistake`

[Viol8]

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.

Re:The dead past

[gallondr00nk]

Sounds like a prime example of whyt government should not interfere with the free market's natural processes (except basic workers' rights protections).

Because one overreaching umbrella way of doing things obviously works for practically everything. Sigh.

I've got karma to burn, so here's a postscript. Fuck the free market. Enjoy cheering and waving the banner for the ideology which is hammering away at your living standards.

Unleashed capitalism is just as gross and obscene as any other ideology that is mistakenly viewed as gospel.