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Computer History Museum Wants to Preserve Minitel History
coondoggie writes "It's been almost a year since France Telecom shut down its once widely popular Minitel online services and historians are worried that its legacy from a preservationist point of view is being lost forever. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA., naturally wants to collect and preserve all manner of industry historical artifacts, and Minitel is one of the central components of its 'Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing' exhibit."
The nationalised telephone company decided to use minitel as a way to look up phone numbers rather than issuing phonebooks 3 times a year. As a consequence the equipment was free and everyone with a telephone had one.
The German Post Office and Telecom offered a similar service called Bildschirmtext (Btx): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext
That system eventually evolved into the T-Online ISP in Germany. So it wasn't entirely a dead end.
. . . and the access nodes for the system were running . . . wait for it . . . OS/2!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The core network of Minitel was owned and operated by the company now known as Orange. However, the device itself is a really dumb text terminal based on ITU-approved standards: V.23, ASCII, videotex, etc. Most Minitel terminals even have a serial port and thus can be hooked to recent computers.
Even back when the core network was still being operated, nothing prevented people from operating their own Minitel server/service. You could directly dial any standard number (not just the short 36xx ones).
I guess that's the general problem with giving stuff away; it's no longer yours.
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