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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."
This is a very elitist/snooty organization. Research very carefully if you have anything of value to "donate" to this museum. Chances are you will never have access to it again -- but rest assured an MBA will.
Minitel and trumpet winsock remind me of a time when the French government, Microsoft and others believed that Internet competing networks would emerge and that they should create their own. Minitel actually had a competing network for quite a while and Microsoft did not believe into the need to include a IP stack in their product.
Who would redo the same today?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The Dutch version of this, Viditel, let me do online banking way before there was internet and when people were still going to big bank buildings to fill out forms to do anything with their account. Can't really remember what else I did with it... What could you do with 1200/75 baud speeds anyway?
Having all this Minitel page data is nice, but would only be useful if they would use a memento style interface where you can browse through time.
I remember Minitel was used several times to organise rallies against the government, as a type of social media if you like.
KERNEL PANIC -SIGFAULT AT ADDRESS #51A54D07
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.
Above & beyond the sex chat sites that made the most money on the Minitel, much of the French government (including education, taxes, trash removal, reimbursement for doctors & dentists, etc) was only available over a minitel connection. When the only way to find out whether you passed an exam or to get an old couch taken away is by using a minitel, you kept using it, all the while hoping they would at last get beyond the tiny 24x40 or 24x80 window the minitel imposed.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Minitel Rose (ASCII pr0n).
The so-called "Pink Pages" generated something like 50% of the revenue for Minitel. It wasn't just ASII p0rn, other . . . um . . . "services" were offered, as well.
If you want to drive acceptance of a new technology . . . offer p0rn on it. Folks will flock to it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
At some point, somebody must have built a bridge and a terminal emulator program so you could use Minitel from a personal computer.
Was the technology that proprietary or what ?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I remember the time I was using the Minitel, there was no security problems: no viruses (contrary to my Amiga computer), no password or credit cars number stolen, no fake "sites" (services), no porn for the kids. The services themselves were not crackable (the administration interface was generally not available thru the Minitel). It was very convienent to get phone numbers from the other side of the country, since at that time phonebooks were limited to the "département" (subdivision of France). It was also handy to do online banking, get exam results. But the most used services were "Minitel Rose" (like "3615 ULLA"), were you could have sex chat with (presumably) girls. In fact one of the major french telecom groups (Free.fr) was founded by Xavier Niel, who earn a lot of money during the golden age of the Minitel Rose. But it was very expensive (even if the terminal itself was given for free), since you had to pay per the connection duration (around 0.15$/min for the 3615 services). And it was slow. Soooooooooooooo slow. And ugly too!
We have been lucky enough, here in France, to get the future of internet before everyone else : minitel ! ( music from star wars playing in the background ). Everything in the "cloud" , nothing in the computer. I think that google, microsoft and facebook should preserve and worship the remains of the late minitel amen.
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).
In fact there _IS_ one. At the top of Grande Arche de La Défense, Paris
But it's closed since 2010 because of political bullshit/jealousy.
All the collections are still in place at the top of this bulding, but it's closed.