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Computer History Museum Wants to Preserve Minitel History

Posted by timothy on from the barn-full-of-compuserve-artifacts-too dept.

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."

7 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Warning about Computer History Museum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Warning about Computer History Museum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is true of most museums, technology or otherwise - unless your donation includes large sums of money, its simply that - a donation, not an invitation to come and 'play' with whatever you 'donated'.

      If you want to play with your artifact, keep it. If you want to see it preserved, donate it. But don't expect the curators to be your personal artifact babysitter, thats not how museum donations work.

    2. Re:Warning about Computer History Museum by mwvdlee · · Score: 3, Informative

      I guess that's the general problem with giving stuff away; it's no longer yours.

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  2. Minitel and trumpet winsock. by ls671 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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    1. Re:Minitel and trumpet winsock. by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Informative

      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!

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    2. Re:Minitel and trumpet winsock. by mad+flyer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      For god sake, when you have no fracking clue on a topic at least be kind enough to keep away from writing aboot it.

      The minitel was never design for competing against the internet. It was put in place in the early 80' way before even rtc modem became affordable at times were few people had computers and barely anyone had heard aboot BBSs.

      In fact, the minitel allowed with a serial cable to be used as a 1200/75bps modem for your computer. At the military/scientific level sure it appeared after tcp/ip networks, but for the public, it was here first and stayed there alone for a long time...

  3. Re:Wow. Quite a lot of users, really. by remi2402 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).