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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 :(
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...
Yes, that's what the summary said: "... A forerunner of the world wide web, Minitel ..."
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.
The rest of the summary showed different.
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.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
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.
The Minitel looks more like a wide-area BBS system and not like the horrendous Flash-infested "web" sites we have today. Like a BBS, Minitel was a closed network with a text-based interface. Of course the first incarnation of the Web wasn't that much different, and there are still text-mode browsers around.
Arpanet predates the minitel in some ways, but the minitel started commercial services in 80/81, and in 84 there where thousend of services and millions of users.
the "Internet" had almost no services except email and ftp before the 90s.
In practice it represents an "alternative reality" to the Internet and cannot really be seen as a fore or post runner, but a similar tool that created a large industry.
And most french "Internet Successes" where started by Minitel entrepreuneurs, only now after about 15 years of "Internet" do we start to have people who create Internet businesses without having first dabbled in the Minitel.
It didn't replace the silicon valley, but it definitivelly gave a "leg up" to france in comparision to other "competitors"
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.
OK, I've sobered up. Just for information, I was born in the 80's in France and am now a researcher computer science researcher at the other end of the world, in Japan. Minitel is what drove me into computer science as I would dream of any career that would let me touch a keyboard at that tine. ind you, secretaries were still using typewriters in France at that time. 3515 ULLA was the equivalent of adultfriendfinder at that time and had paper ads all over countryside roads, usually on electrical installations such as transformers. Minitel might not have been the best of models, but it was in line with the current French policy at that time, which tried to be independent of USA at any cost. We had even our own Micro-computer models made by Thompon (a.k.a Technicolor). Even if unpractical overall, Minitel prepared the French population for the use of the Internet afterwards, making France one of the most active population on the Internet afterwards. So, R.I.P Minitel, we value what you brought to our nation. You will always have a place in our hearts.
the 3615 stuff is absolutely fascinating; sort of like how p0rn blazed a trail for the home video systems of the 80's (VHS, et. al.).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.