Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web | Hacker News Reader

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web

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352 pointssohkamyung107 comments

A company I worked for used to host Minitel services. In particular, it was a system to handle driving test allotments, reservations and cancellations between the government ("Préfecture") and the driving schools.

The service was provided for free to the government, the company organised free training sessions for government clerks, and it was the driving schools who paid for the service when dialling into our minitel servers.

It technically wasn't a monopoly, because the driving schools could still go down to the préfecture, and do everything using the forms/pen/paper.

The company tried on a number of occasions to get the driving schools to move from the Minitel service to the new web version. Every single time, there was a huge push-back from the driving school unions, about how expensive the new service was, and how "unusable" the website was, compared to the Minitel.

We even had people calling in, saying that we were extortionists. "We've been using this for over 20 years, and never paid a cent; now you want us to pay xx€ a month?" I guess some of them really didn't look at their phone bill.

I heard about 4 or 5 "planned terminations" of the Minitel service during my stint from 2010 to 2015. France Telecom/Orange even provides a "Minitel over IP" service these days, where a website can be enrolled into their payment service, and users pay per minute on the website. It's a superb scam tool (just have a hidden iframe open a pay-as-you-go page), and Orange is constantly fighting the fraudsters.

Talking about migrations, I worked at two places (tax office, and large store) that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every time it was a disaster. I was much enamored by the old system that was hyper efficient, both at the low level (zero bandwidth, fixed layout) and at higher level too, all that wasn't spent on visuals and gimmicks was used for "smart" features, semantic suggestions, math auto correct on the fly. Also almost no learning phase. Sad.

> that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every time it was a disaster.

Usually the first service is build in an Agile manner. It starts small, and more and more features are added as years pass by. Then some one decides to create a complete new system from scratch, and they never realize all the hidden complexity that exists in the original solution. So this second waterfall project fails and needs years to become usable.

Happened something like that in this case? :)

Can't say, I wasn't working on this, I just witnessed it.

My best guess is that nobody wanted to maintain the old so IT decided to surrender to the latest enterprise fad.

I can understand this. I keep seeing examples of people cherishing the largely keyboard operated ANSI/ASCII interfaces because once they had the navigation keys internalized, they could operate them largely without looking.

And frankly HN regulars should not be surprised. Just look at the continued love for tiling window managers and terminals for development work. Never mind the "minimalism" of HN itself, largely consisting of text.

In the same vein, the Nokia 32/3310 could be navigated easily without looking. There were four buttons, a pair of arrows, ok, and cancel. A real, pure touch interface provided you could memorize the button sequences.

Later models with 4 directions and spatial menus were a step backwards in terms of usability IMO. I always had to look to ensure I hadn't accidentally clicked a corner and moved in diagonal.

Full productivity on dumbphones was realized when you learned you could hit 1 to activate the first item in a menu, 2 for the second etc. 5-2-3 boom new text message

Not failing to mention how handy that 'Menu-523' came in handy when the dpad wore down(usually the first keys to fail on a feature-phone). It kept me from having to buy a new phone for months.

Not to mention writing a text while driving, all without taking your eyes off the road...

Best i recall, the full dpad and such came because of J2ME requirements. the specs for that expected at minimum two soft buttons and a dpad.

This reminds me of the coin operated ice machines that the luddities would pay instead of their ice delivery guy (ignorant of the fact the machine was running on their electricity)

Technicaly it would be like rent but I wouldn't be surprised if some paid for the machine several times

Many virtual terminals still default to the 80 character lines of punchcards. The new contains or emulates the old.

It's in the name: Terminal Emulator

A couple historical anecdotes:

There was the equivalent of the hug of death multiple times every year when students were checking their results, overloading the servers as (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people tried to furiously dial in simultaneously to get results from various nationwide exams such as the infamous Baccalauréat.

In 1981 for the presidential elections, the result was broadcasted live on the Minitel and showed up live on the news:

(On TV) https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao

(Remastered Minitel output) https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I

The Minitel was such a national pride that the Internet had a hard time piercing through the habits and the collective mind, setting back France by a couple of years on that front. Said misplaced pride is also very visible on some other bad decision making such as forcefully applying national preference to technology such as Bull computers in the enterprise or Thomson TO7&MO5 in schools which were ripped apart by the competition nonetheless. This behavior is still visible today as the government tried to push for "the French Cloud" by heavily subsidizing software such as a poor alternative to Dropbox which became Orange Cloud or looking the other way when Deezer was clearly violating IP rights by padding its music catalogue as it was missing deals from the majors. Same goes with banks shunning Apple/Android Pay in favor of being hell-bent on that sad sad Paylib thing, and various other similar heavy cases of NIH. I'm tentatively hopeful but very cautions about that "French SV" thing. Wait&see.

Or maybe switching from "nothing" to "internet" has way more outcomes than switching from "minitel" to "internet", and that's why internet took more time to grow in France ? And there might be a thousand reasons not to host your data in the USA, and that's why they search for local alternative.

Stop simplifying everything to "French pride", that's just a myth.

As a non-French, I wouldn't say that being proud of the Minitel was misplaced at the beginning, as it was a great accomplishment for its time. The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem.

Regarding "national preference", no EU country is big enough to make that work for these kinds of technology; maybe the EU as a whole, if there wasn't the big problem of language...

> The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem.

One of the issues here is that the internet was not "a clearly superior alternative" as it had some aspects which were (and still are) significant downgrades.

Monetisation is a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on ("kiosk" services with a 4:2 split between the service and the network operator, with multiple price points) and in the early 90s added secure standardised CC payment (new models had a CC reader/terminal built in).

Well, if you prefer, let's say "an alternative that was obviously going to win on the market".

PS As a consumer I find it very hard to say that use-time payment is better than flat access cost + many different ways to pay depending on what you use.

It was not obvious that internet was going to win the market, there were barely any home computers in France vs a few millions minitel, there were pretty much no commercial ISP but local non profit ISPs and the national phone operator was raking in huge profit from the minitel and had no incentive to upgrade its inadequate infrastructure.

You seem to assume that the internet is flat fee, that is historically not the case.

The internet was pay by the hour or pay by the kB for a very long time. The flat free subscriptions only emerged around the 00's.

My first internet connection was through a 28.8k modem, I know very well that it wasn't flat at the time, and that's exactly why I said that "pay per minute of use" is terrible for consumers compared to today's situation, while the OP said: "...as it had some aspects which were (and still are) significant downgrades. Monetisation is a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on"

I'd say the Internet still doesn't have a very good monetisation system. Card payment is several times too much effort to use, takes a good couple of minutes, and isn't reasonable for a one-off service. PayPal and similar services are a mess, and not much better. The point wasn't that use-time is good, it's that there was monetisation integrated into the design of the system, and it was easy for the customer to use.

I would argue that internet was not a clearly superior alternative. Let's just take one simple example:the minitel network had solved the problem of income for site provider, no need for a broken business model based on invading user privacy and collecting as much data as possible.

By the time the Internet became big, Minitel was already very ingrained in french day to day life.

Everyone knew the Internet was going to eventually win. But everyone also knew that it would take the Internet many many years before services matured, and became actually useful.

While Minitel's technology was clearly lagging, it managed to provide a lot of very useful services that would take lots of money and work to replace.

A rather good analogy would be the situation with credit cards in the US. The world has moved on to chip & pin (or contactless) while the US has stuck with magnetic stripe cards for an awfully long time

There's one example where "national preference" worked for the EU as a whole - GSM.

Even before GSM there was NMT, that demonstrated the possibility of a single standard for use in multiple nations.

NMT was analog though and thus much more constrained in capacity. And GSM brought us the SIM card, that made switching phone or service provider as simple as moving or replacing a card.

There's quite a few of things that requires sources or debunking in here: France being set back by a couple years on the internet front due to minitel, misplaced pride and sliding to totally different matter, to7/mo5 being ripped apart by competition, talking of today government as if it was the same than in the 1980's.

I think there indeed is national pride from the French Tech. I don't think USA is totally immune from it. How many non USA services do US people use ? Of course many were invented here but some were not and were reimplememted.

There is also a big "buy American" push in general, as best i can tell.

Isn't "buy American" actually "buy in America something made in China" ? Walmart is such an example.

"Buy American" mostly only applies to the federal government. Everywhere else it's mostly just talk.

I'm not from the USA but I do live in the Americas so technically buy American means anywhere in this region ;)

Actually technically it doesn’t. America is the short name of the United States of America. North America is a continent. South America is a continent. There is no such place as “America” unless you are referring to the United States. “Americans” refers to the nationality of one from the United States. It’s the adjective describing “something from the United States.”

I have never heard anyone in Brazil refer to themselves as American. That’s just nonsense and no product from Paraguay is stamped with Hecho en America.

Interestingly, people from the US or Canada are referred to as North Americans by Mexicans – despite Mexico being in North America.

It's a never ending source of confusion and bad translations. We (I'm from Panama) definitely consider ourselves "americanos" and the continent is for sure called América. It is clearly geographically a continent. Nobody in normal speech talks about "las Américas". So "American" is translated as "estadounidense" (United Statesian).

Note the use of America_s_. The s there is something i have seen often used to encompass all the nations of the American continent.

Yes.

Africa = Africans

Europe = Europeans

Asian = Asians

Americas = ?

Netherlands -> Dutch.

Language often has idiosyncrasies, and "American" meaning from the US rather than the Americas is one of them.

It's a shame the French government doesn't mandate OCaml for all their software projects.

If the UK government had forced the public sector to use Acorn Archimedes instead of crappy PCs we would be at least a decade ahead now, maybe two.

I've been lurking here for a few months and this has motivated me to comment. As a former prolific RiscPC user, the hardware and software was rubbish at a technical level even if it worked well from an end user perspective. I would not want to run a browser or any thin client software on the platform. There is no memory protection or privilege separation. I watched a whole Econet deployment get wrecked by a virus once. They just binned it and got netware and windows NT in because it was less crazy in the end.

Not sure... I was a massive Acorn fan. But looking back, I'm not sure how far ahead of MacOS RiscOS really was. It was an advance on MSDos/Windows of course... but that wasn't the best thing out there by any means.

ARMs were (still are) nice processors, and have obviously lived on and done well.

The solutions of the "baccalaureat", high school end of course exam were also available online just a few hours after the exam, if not immediately after. I still wonder who entered the them and how they got them so quickly. I guess some paid teachers who were able to get a copy of the exam tests or even illegal copies before the exam took place. I remember spending quite some time checking all online the solutions of the Math exam.

Back when I worked for the UK version of Minitel (Prestel) for high profile events such as budget day staff where asked not to use it.

Thigh as I worked on the Byzantine Prestel billing system we had permission to use the budget pages and also listened live to the speech in case the government did something fun like change VAT (sales tax) in the middle of the month.

So they just sue giant US software companies for monoply and privacy violations. Possibly a bit of not-invented-here frustration in those suits.

Yeah or maybe those US companies are monopolies that heavily violate people privacy while engaging in tax fraud.

It's a more general attitude, and it's called Autarchy (you may know it in its weaker form: NIMB + NIH not invented here).

Thank Nazifascism for that. Italy had it, but it quickly fade out in the 1960's. Spain and France still have it. Hopefully less and less as time goes by.

I'm sorry if this makes you uncomfortable. It's just true.

"Minitel enthusiasts cherished the network’s privacy and anonymity. In late 1984, Minitel engineers added a feature to the terminal that saved the last page visited and made it easier for the user to pick up an interrupted session—as a browser cookie does today. The public outcry was swift and brutal. Editorials in newspapers, which (rightly) saw Minitel as a competitor, warned that Big Brother had arrived. Some 3,000 terminals were returned in protest. The PTT soon dropped this feature." Pretty sad to see where we've come since then

I think the basic problem is that while back then we had a low water mark of privacy, the Soviet Union, that the west wanted to stay above as a point of pride, these days we have none.

Well we have China, but western leaders seem to be more prone to using the Chinese Great Firewall as a leading example than a bad example.

Funnily China seems to be treated more like a capitalist oligarchy these days (and may well be operating like one as well).

The last remaining communist nations to be "feared" seems to be Cuba and North Korea.

Privacy lol I bet France telecom could look at every thing and as it was tied to the phone line it wasn't very anonymous.

It was great for "piracy". You had message board where people would swap floppies. You basically copied a game (Atari ST games of course) and would send the floppies hoping your counterpart would do the same.

It was a great time and I learnt a lot about the geek community, the sharing and got access to many games which at age 15 I could not afford.

Elsewhere one made do with classified ads in computer magazines.

I wish i could find the story i read once from a guy in GB that did so for the Amiga, and found himself so inundated with replies that he bought himself a second drive for his A500 and spend whole weekends swapping floppies.

That's what I wanted to point out, classified had much more traction than minitel to swap disks.

Fond memories of programming my Amiga to scrap pages from the Minitel to fill up up database instead of doing data entry by hand, as ha been expected of me during my first intership…

Was Minitel something only the middle and upper classes had, or was it a universal thing?

I'm from the UK, I didn't get onto the web until 1999, before that we used Teletext. I think the advantage to it was most televisions supported Teletext by the 1980s and it was a free service - albeit you had to pay your annual TV license.

It was ubiquitous, everybody had a minitel at home since it was provided for free by France Télécom.

The white/yellow page service (3611) was free for the first three minutes and was widely used. My parents never had the (huge) yearly book version at home.

As mentioned in other comments it was also widely used to consult Baccalauréat (national exam like SAT) results.

At peak in 2003 there were 9.1 millions minitels for 55 millions people so not ubiquitous but common.

3611 used to offer the first 3 minutes free for a few years then removed this.

3611 was free until 2007, when it became mostly irrelevant. 9.1 millions of minitels is about half the population (in number of households). I don't think that 2003 was a peak since Internet was already there for quite some time (people could get broadband at this time).

People had a minitel per family, not per person, so nearly 10 million minitels make for a pretty good penetration rate.

Everybody had one. You didn't have to buy the terminal, most people rented it from the phone company for a few francs a month. And the most useful services were free.

try that again. At first it was given at no cost to people who accepted to stop receiving the paper phonebook, then you could rent or buy depending on the specific model. During the golden age about 20% homes were equipped at peak it reached 25% (far from everybody had one).

There were no services available for free, at first there were two kinds: the service provider pays the operator or the user pays the operator (about 3€ an hour). no money for the service provider. Then came the kiosk offer which started the golden age: the user now pays 9€ an hour with 6€ for the service and 3 for the operator.

9 million terminals for a total population of 55 million, it is pretty good coverage. I used to live in Cesson-Sévigné, where it was born. One day, my dad came back home early 80's with one for free.

After few years everybody I know had one per household, except for my grandparents. Pretty much every household who wanted one could get one.

Later they built more fancy terminals (faster modem, combined with phone, better screen/graphics, etc.) and rented them. The free one was still a good deal.

The White Pages where totally free. And if I recall the Yellow Pages had a the first minute or so free. I remember navigating the pages as fast as possible to not pay the fee.

As mentioned before some school results and even applications were made using the terminal, for residual fee on the phone bill.

My mom was buying online (3Suisses, Redoute and CAMIF) through the terminal from early 80's until early 2000. She had a hard time to move to internet website when it comes to buy online. She heard so much of CC fraud online that she felt safer using the Minitel.

I was also a heavy user of telext in my earlier years as a news junkie - I wouldn't compare it to Minitel or the web though, as it was unidirectional only.

The UK equivalent of Minitel was Prestel, which used the same display system as Teletext.

An effort to bring Minitel-based computing to the masses happened in Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1990's. The service was named CommunityLink. It was a joint venture between U.S. West ( then, a Regional Bell Operating Company ) and France Telecom.

You can see the overview beginning at minute 16:00 in this episode of the old TV show The Computer Chronicles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwNc1zQ0Fpg

The above episode begins with the Minitel story from France.

CommunityLink didn't really seem to catch on, locally. We did have a thriving BBS community at this time and most techies that I knew had CompuServe accounts.

"and dudes (mecs in French) browsed the personal ads at 3615 MEC." <- Something was lost in the translation there.

You mean they weren't explicit enough in the article ?

Funny the company behind is still here https://goo.gl/2YGfuq (SFW)

What was lost exactly? The reference to MEC is explained

Your sibling comment links the current website. Apparently it's a gay dating service. Wasn't clear to me from the article.

Ah that wasn't clear to me either.

Quick question for those who remember the time. What was BBSing like back in the Minitel days?

In the States and other places without an equivalent system, BBSs were pretty much the only way to connect in any kind of "on-line", but as soon as the Web became widespread BBSs died a very quick death. I would suppose that Minitel would have prevented an equivalent BBS scene from developing in France, but I have no idea. I know there were reasonably big scenes in other parts of Europe though.

There were plenty of BBSs in France at the time but mostly used by people who were "into computers". Oh, and Compuserve!

Is this just me or are we getting more and more articles about the Minitel on HN these days?

Not only HN, I think it's been on reddit too. It's odd since the service has been removed entirely a few years ago and already got coverage at that time.

Maybe the issues with net neutrality push people into history. Similarly there were Ethernet stories last week.

I suspect it's just some astroturfing to go along with the French start up visa thing.

Or people who are stumbling across reruns of Archer...

(If any are unfamiliar, Archer's subscription to Minitel is a running joke in the series)

Yeah, I tend to think that we're all looking for an alternative to the looming destruction of the Internet that is inevitably going to happen when Net-neutrality dies.

As an older user, I'd love it if we could figure out a way to resurrect Minitel/Teletext and use it as a way of routing around the damage that is coming from the political classes.

> for an alternative to the looming destruction of the Internet that is inevitably going to happen when Net-neutrality dies.

The Minitel was the archetype of service centralization with a single hardware provider. Hardly a good case for Net neutrality.

Yes, very centralized, but in early 80's with telco companies having pretty much a monopoly on their own respective market, and practically no standard hardware, the Minitel was the best that could be done to get a large chunk of the population to go online, make safely online transactions, exchange messages, before the Web.

Today, 35 years after with what we know, with a deregulated telco environment, with internet protocols and corresponding hardware, sure, the Minitel is not ideal for net neutrality. I think it was still a good step, and looking back, not a too shabby execution either. Now 35 years later, the market brought Android smartphone, which are the new commodity for people to go online.

yes it was the old central state controlled telephone system model a bit like OSI x.400 and x.500 where supposed to work.

Minitel wasn't exactly net neutrality friendly.

I think a better option would be BBSs and Fidonet (the latter still in operation, iirc).

I think one french dude, once a fidonet hoster, is federating independant ISP now.

xkcd 10000 rule

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I remember having used minitel 1B (80 colomns) in 1992 to connect to my school from home (600km away) to send my updated (using vi) report (in latex) to my teacher. The main drawback of course was that the phone line was always busy. It was using a quite cheap (the equivalent of 0.02€ per minutes) connection (36 21).

Anyone with Minitels or compatible modems could run their own service, just like a BBS.

There were quite a lot of these services, that anyone could connect to, for just the cost of a local communication.

They had interesting features such as file transfers, real-time multiparty chatrooms, the ability to define macros (custom sequences of control code to display fancy images and animations in discussion boards and chatrooms), and more.

At that time, local phone calls were not free, but they were cheap compared to longer-distance (but still in France) calls.

So, these services were federating very local communities. Members frequently met in person. Think about Facebook just for your city, where most people in your friend list are people you actually know in person and often hang out with.

That was pretty awesome. Internet being global is amazing, but these very local communities were also amazing in a different way.

The article isn't kidding when it said that the old phone system was terrible, phones typically had a second earpiece so you could hear through both ears in the hope of making out what the other party said.

And them in a huge jump foreward, the PTT switched to digital and by 1980 anybody could get digital service (isdn) cheaply at their house.

Some previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881

What was the significance of the '3615' in all the service codes? Was this just a common prefix like 'www' in web addresses?

It's the short phone number to dial to get access to the portal where you enter the name of the service you want. There were different ones with different pricing. 3614 was cheaper (no revenue for the service I think), 3615 was regular and 3617 was expensive (you could buy stuff, like games by staying online).

While most services were accessible through this portal (operated by the French telco), you could also dial a "regular number" to access some services à la BBS.

The various services had different peicing tiers. 3615 was the most used and would cost a few francs per minutes. Some sites would force you to spend some time on their 3615 number so you could accumulate 'minutes' of use through the cheaper '3614' number. They used that scheme to modulate the cost of their service.

It was more than a common prefix. More like a portal.

For what it's worth, I still have one around here. It makes for a great retro-terminal that can be plugged on a 1200 bauds serial connection. I agree that it isn't the most lightweight solution, but it at least works pretty well, and without hassle.

As an aside, i recall running into something similar to a Minitel, only it was web based and used ISDN for connectivity.

Basically it was a desk phone with a slide out keyboard and embedded web browser.

There were a bunch of devices kind of like that around the dot-com boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey

Also, shoutout to BelTel in South Africa, my first foray into online world, including national chat, way back in 1985.

Credit where credit is due: the french invented fembots

Don't forget about Infovía in Spain, too, even though that was much later.

And Prestel in the UK, but it was never as ubiquitous as le Minitel.

And Bildschirmtext (BTX) in Germany.

And the Videotel by SIP in Italy (a real failure): https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotel http://quartdepomme.fr/quartdepomme/VIDEOTEL_-_MINITEL_%28Up...

And Beltel in South Africa

Minitel really illustrates my view on the tech business: Go global or go home. Scale is King.

Well Minitel tried to go global there was a Californian trial (and a country wide scale was unheard or for online services).

It was called USVideotel, and it was moderately successful. I worked for them in the late 80s. It was very popular amongst its users, but eventually lost to Prodigy and AOL.

Or maybe successful tech eventually becomes global. Tech history is littered with examples of good companies that failed because they expanded too fast

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