Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561

It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off? There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can't find much information on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these networks?

Reply All did a great episode all about Minitel, for those interested: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/french-connection/

I graduated from a Telecommunications technical school in Budapest in 1992. We took the exam from relay-based switching centres (also 7A2 and ARF102) and had to repair an old style rotary dial phone to pass and get a diploma. Our teacher told us about Minitel in France but emphasised that the real thing will be ISDN (64kbps). In a couple of years in college I had high speed Internet access, Silicon Graphics workstations with those beautiful, huge blue monitors. It is hard to imagine nowadays what a change that was, though switching from my Motorola flip phone to iPhone 4 was also quite something.

South Africa also had Beltel around that time, a very similar service I'm sure. I remember being wowed by the real-time cross-country chat and the better-than-ANSI block shapes for drawing :)

Interesting that at the same time I was using a C64 with 300 and 1200 baud modems to get on the local BBSs in Canada. Which was way more of a hassle.

Not sure what other systems ran, but, AFAIK, the one in São Paulo, called Videotexto, was served out of a DPS-8M mainframe running MULTICS.

Proud "Videotel" owner from Italy (worked on ITAPAC x25). Same as minitel, and with some tricks you'd have QSD as well ;-)

Apart from PRESTEL which preceded Minitel I am sure Samuel Fedida would take a dim view of the IEEE not mentioining him.

Covered many times here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minitel&sort=byPopularity&pref...

Don't forget about Infovía in Spain!