Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Hope you are well. My mail is in my profile =)
We used to joke that for Prestel you could have a custom tariff for all services almost down to the user level - People whose name is fred and own a goldfish we used to joke.
Prestel Billing use to run on a Unisys mainframe and a super niche language called LINC - and was baroque and crufty to an extreme - there was a BBC micro that sat in a corner and Bonged occasional that was part of it (exactly what I never found out)
I was responible for, ah, certain outages at the time. Not in any malicious sense, but because my game (running on a 4Mhz Z80) managed to overload the whole network.
Did you know Steve Cornelius? my manger later on - you arnt that Hzaeii from Shades BTW?
Recently I worked at the next building over in the same building as the mermaid theatre and used to dink in The cockpit" the "old geezers pub" as a young colleague called it.
And yes, I am that Hazeii from Shades :)
Which fits the mindset as you say, since the game was priced per-unit time and BT were coining it in on the UK side (this wasl still a few years pre-eternal September).
[0] Plasma screen, 1 16-bit ISA expansion slot and 1 8-bit, built in PSU.
Most of the R&D was done by the CCETT lab in Rennes, Brittany. Well into the 90s they were advocating for a graphics-oriented protocol named VEMMI to replace videotex instead of the web. Sort of a cross between X11 and a IBM 3270 terminal conceptually. There were a lot of pitched battles between the Not-invented-here and Web standards camps at FT R&D in those days.
As for the roots of the Minitel, they are a bit more prosaic. France believes in industrial policy. When president Giscard made upgrading the phone network a national priority after years of neglect under de Gaulle, the department became the largest government department by budget. When that started to taper off in the late 70s, they needed to find a new outlet for the manufacturing capacity that had hitherto being making Alcatel E10 TDM switches, and the Minitel was that outlet. One of my 6th-grade classmates was actually part of the Vélizy trial project. The paid external provider model was the result of the press worrying FT would compete with them in information services and insisting on an open model.
Later Minitels were VT100 compatible, albeit with an atrocious keyboard. I used one as terminal to connect to my university’s Vax running Unix over a 9600 baud serial line from my dorm room. Considering it was free when a real VT100 was more expensive than a PC, that was a substantial cost engineering achievement.
Hopefully we never told our parents aout what we were doing.. It was my first dating App experience. 10 years before having a Web connexion.
Imagine : - All french citizen had a free minitel device (like a mini computer). It was amitious for sure... - Now the only problem with State driven technological projects : Once it was delivered, Th french telecom did not continue to improve the system. Oterwise, France would have been the center of the Web I supose...
We figured out pretty early on that by saying "Female", you opened yourself up to a torrent of creepy come-ons, which to us was absolutely hilarious. Here was this complete stranger who did not have so much as a profile picture to go off of, either professing his undying love to you after a few messsages, or straight up using abusive and degrading language.
As an old millenial now, it's been pretty shocking to me how open Gen Z is about revealing numerous identifying details about themselves on social networks. I'm under 40 and we were raised to protect our privacy online, and this was when surveillance tech was in the stone ages.
I believe it is a mistake to think that. I have some notes from an undergraduate course in digital signal processing, dated 1979. There is a section written by someone from "Joint Speech Research Unit, Cheltenham" there can only be one organisation in that town interested in researching speech, good friends of No Such Agency.
For whatever reason, I've almost always preferred playing female characters, but it quickly became an eye-opener to me how creepy other dudes are online. One of the more abusive of these sorts (funny at the time until I realized it was a behavior he probably continued to actual woman) was when I'd gone in to help some RL friends who were stuck in a dungeon, and they had this random chap in the group. As soon as I joined up, he started hitting on me. I ignored it for a while until it started getting really strange, and I told him rather flatly:
"I'm a dude, dude."
He went ballistic and called me all manner of names, inferring that I must clearly be homosexual because I was playing a woman (not sure how that works). After launching into his insults, he quickly left the group. I think he tried harassing me via private messages, but I blocked him by that point.
It occurred to me sometime later that the fact he realized he was hitting on another guy must have challenged his sexuality and made him incredibly uncomfortable doubtless leading to his anger and lashing out.
I noticed this behavior dropped off dramatically in the years following, either because more dudes (like me) were playing female characters and the creepy sorts realized it was a minefield to take the risk against random other players who may or may not troll them. Or perhaps harassment of the sort started to be taken seriously by the moderation team as the number of women playing increased.
I have reasons to doubt the latter and suspect it's a combination of the former. I also suspect most of the harassment was probably concentrated in guilds by that point where I wasn't as likely to see it firsthand as I played largely with people I personally knew. Leastwise, the weird random encounters dropped off precipitously within about a year.
I've had coworkers in customer success get messages from stalkers via Intercom like "Hey <female name> I know where you live and work, be careful."
It's true: The experience was eye-opening to me, and that was what--13 years ago? Actually longer, now that I think about it, since I started playing at release in 2004 (also on female characters).
And you're right, I think it's a valuable experience that has to be seen to be believed. It's easy for me to post about it here, but it's difficult to convey how annoying it was (at best). Not simply from borderline sexual harassment either. There was, at the time, an undercurrent of harassing accusation that any dude playing a female character clearly had to be "gay." Looking back on it, this whole idiotic and immature belief was laughable, because all the gay guys we had in our guild played male characters. They also gave me a hard time for being hit on with some regularity, so at least there was some levity among our group to make light of an otherwise sad and disgraceful situation.
Unfortunately, that's not the only circumstance I can remember. There's easily half a dozen others varying from odd to outright creeper material that stand out, though not as much as the one I shared above. I figure if it happened to me that frequently, it's absolutely happening to women whom other players know are women MUCH more often. It wasn't just limited to long term encounters, either. Just standing around waiting for something as a female character in the early days of the game sometimes painted me as a potential target.
A friend of mine who also played female characters--and who moonlighted as a stand-up comedian--had similar experiences, but his dialog was absolutely hilarious to watch.
Had they improved it, it would still have made it paying by the minute because they had no interest in any other business model.
On the serious side - Minitel was such an incredible experience! The only feeling similar to that was the first email I sent in 1992.
I feel it is a horribly lost opportunity to lead the web, teen like us were driving the idea a lot (I was trying to explain my parents to not take the phone book anymore becauseit was all there, a search away...)
Nitpicking: AFAIR, the Minitel was not "free" but rented - just like most ISPs in France today rent an ADSL modem-router.
Also, the Minitel was not really a mini-computer but merely a screen, a keyboard and a modem in a single box. People could tell the difference with a computer, because at that time 8-bit micro-computers (Amstrad CPC, Commodore C64, ZX Sinclair, Atari ST, you name it) were not uncommon at home.
> Now the only problem with State driven technological projects : Once it was delivered, Th french telecom did not continue to improve the system
Actually, they did. The French Wikipedia page [1] is much more detailed than its English language counterpart. The latest model could display JPEG black-and-white images, and spoke at 9600bps (versus 1200bps for the first gen.). But it is true it was too little too late; it could not rival the multimedia PC/Modem combo that started to be affordable for the masses at that time.
The (maybe?) too slow evolution of the tech probably had to more to do with the huge userbase and backwards compatibility issues than with "State driven tech projects" (BTW French civil nuclear power and high speed trains were for a long time "State driven tech" and are still alive and more-or-less kicking). Just like IPv4 seems to not want to die today.
By 1988 three million terminals were installed, with 100,000 new units installed monthly. The telephone directory received 23 million calls monthly, with 40,000 updates daily. About 6,000 other services were available, with 250 added monthly. France Télécom estimated that almost 9 million terminals—including web-enabled personal computers (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux)—had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people (of a total population of 60 million). Developed by 10,000 companies, in 1996, almost 26,000 different services were available. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
A similar (yet not nearly as successful as Minitel) service existed in Germany (BTX [1]), and I remember my uncle still using it for online banking in 2005 (it was officially shut down in 2001, but online banking continued to work until around 10 years ago). He used a special software for Windows 98 which acted as a kind of BTX browser, so for around 10 years he used BTX and the Internet in parallel, on the same machine.
Minitel was based on x25. Contrary to IP, x25 was a network where the terminals are dumb and the network needs to be smart.
This means that there was an incredibly (for the time) steep learning curve to transition from a Minitel user to a Minitel provider.
This meant that the technology could not be easily studied and tested in a garage (even if some like me did), not impossible but tougher than with IP.
You know the rest of the story.
There are also more minor factors that lead to fall of Minitel but mainly it was IMHO a closed vs. open model root cause.
I was heavily into both service and tech of Minitel at that time, AMA.
At the time that was a common statement, but I fail to see why X25 mandates dumb terminals.
However a profound difference was that X25 used streams whereas TCP uses packets. A stream is akin to a TCP socket.
It is a fundamental difference that stems from the fact that a X25 data exchange is safe from errors.
There was a smart gateway node that translated complex x25 from the Minitel service providers nodes into simple bidirectional stream of bytes to the Minitels, it was a specialized type of packet asssembler disassembled (PAD) called a PAD Videotex (PAVI).
Now x25 did have packets, Minitel terminals did not. So the PAVI and x25 servers were working very differently and with more complexity (hence smart) than Minitel serial terminals (hence dumb).
It’s not that x25 mandated dumb terminals.
Are there any public x.25 networks still operating?
Not that I know of. My plan if to use old line simulators and other tools i can find on ebay and telcom equipment reseller sites to create a "fake" private one. This is one of those projects that I'm working on purely out of novelty interest :P.
One road not taken could have been to define a structured document format in ASN.1 that would be displayed by the terminal.
X.25 is a “packet-switched” “connection-oriented” protocol.
[which p.s. makes sense for traditional telecom’s view of the world, which as you know is circuit-switched. One of the main beefs of telcos in regards to IP was traffic management. Compare X.25 congestion management with IP. ]
Some kind soul has delved into the details of modalities of networking protocols:
x.25 had a MFT (Metric Fuck Ton) of error checking (at each layer). I used to work in OSI based networking - debugging OSI issues was an art - no wireshark back then
However You could do some cool things with osi based networking binary attachments natively supported, years before the internet had it.
Interworking between legacy system like Telex, I used to have my own telex number and answerback and could have had an x.400 email address at the country level.
Ps id take site you linked with pinch of salt no mention of PAD's for example.
Operators trying to build walled gardens is a pattern that repeated itself until it became such a low margin business that the only operators able to make a profit were those merely offering full internet over 3G and 4G and not even bothering with the black hole of R&D needed to keep up with what was happening elsewhere. There were attempts in both standards to grandfather in a lot of stuff that is now exclusively done over IP but none of it ended up being popular. The history of mobile phone operators is just a long succession of attempts to copy things from the internet at the time and trying to turn them into walled garden things. Each of those things failed. We're not watching TV via operator provided services. We're not doing video calls via operator provided services, their game portals have long died and faded away. We're not browsing any WAP sites. Instagram wiped out what little adoption MMS ever had. None of it stood a chance.
The incentives and ownership were just wrong and the role as operators as essential middlemen just never panned out in the real world as they hoped.
Many telcos of course managed to convert themselves into successful mobile operators ultimately but their role was diminished to providing network access. My android phone has a phone stack. The only stuff that comes in via my phone number is basically recruiter cold calls. It's a small internet device with some quaint legacy features that I rarely use. Really, numeric identifiers that you have to punch in? In 2020? How is that still a thing? I remember memorizing shit like that a few decades ago.
So, minitel is merely an early and probably expensive incarnation of that. France telecom subsidized the devices and had to earn it back via regular network charges. I doubt that generated anywhere near what they hoped in revenue.
Many hackers were trying to escape it by becoming their own providers and also connecting with other international x25 servers and foreign hackers. For example, Assange was actually from these times.
Nevertheless, it did generate much more revenue than what they initially envisioned.
Dedicated private companies (myspace, facebook, gmail, etc...) started building walled gardens.
Basically the telcos came from another direction: "hey our users are not paying us for that stuff they are doing with some other company on our network! Lets fix it by copying that stuff in some half-assed way and then charge for it."
That's a bad idea because now you are charging for stuff that users are already getting elsewhere that they don't really need you for. So, you basically end up with an empty room problem. Worse, due to the network effect some of these things don't make sense if they are operator specific. E.g. An O2 only social network or video call service is just not a thing. So, now we are talking standardization and design by committee. This is exactly why most of the stuff in 3G flopped (other than IP networking): they were years late to market with stuff that barely worked with basically noone caring about it.
Funny how people live in totally different bubbles. I see you are based in Berlin (I'm in Denmark) and I have no idea how it is there but here I -as a geek with very geeky friends- don't know anyone who use their phone as you describe. Sure a few calls are via Facebook with video and some messages too (though many are starting to refuse to use social media) but the overwhelming majority of use is normal old phone-calls, SMS and MMS. Inside my bubble things like you describe (internet based stuff) is where "old people" have moved and younger people are moving away from. Especially those who hate all the data mining done by Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. I don't have a single app on my phone with those capabilities you use and I'm not missing out. Of course I'm sure other very different bubbles are right next door :-)
>Operators trying to build walled gardens is a pattern that repeated itself
Apple, Facebook...
The only numbers I call are people like my Doctor to make an appointment because they don't do email for whatever reason (which would make a lot of business sense for them). But mostly my phone is a mini tablet for me. Young people here mainly distinguish themselves by maybe using different networks.
People who hate Facebook are common. People who understand Facebook actually also runs Instagram and Whatsapp are less common. Last time I checked they are still getting a lot of daily use, also from Denmark.
In the UK sms messaging is a key part of a lot of taxi films work flow - who needs UBER
iOS supports SMS/MMS in iMessage. These conversations have green bubbles instead of blue bubbles[0].
This occasionally becomes a status symbol, where showing up as green on someone's iMessage indicates that you don't have an iPhone, and thus are poor / low status.
SMS and MMS on iOS both predate iMessage: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Messages
Not sure it's that simple. While you couldn't easily host your own services on the telco mainframes, there was nothing stopping companies from offering services over the phone. We had a Minitel service where I grew up in Brazil and numerous BBSs supported the 1200/75 dial in speeds and had specific UIs (or, at least, "ASCII" art) for the terminals.
Supporting the cheap and easily available modems was a no-brainer for the BBS owners, even though they needed to do bit-banging to make the asymmetric speed work.
Think of the terminal as a primitive but ubiquitous browser and the phone system as a circuit switched network and the dial in services as websites and you have the 80's web.
The last time I had to use it must have been in 1999 as the only choice to enter your college preferences. And there was "Minitel over the internet" for some time. Apparently it only closed in 2012!
Transitioning the country to the Internet was botched in a typical French fashion though.
As for "primitive" it's only on version 13 that Unicode got the 2x3 ITU T.100 mosaics used in Minitel...
People are still using Braille to draw graphics that could be neatly done with those terminals.
It was so expensive to use it that I was barred from even touching it. The only time I used it was many many years later, to check the result of the ceremonious baccalaureat high school exam.
It was slow and had ugly graphics compared to the VGA of my 386 but it still felt magical.
But the less known nerd services were found on much less expensive 3614 access code such as RTEL, Privilege, QBBS, ...
Even some hackish servers where on the super cheap 3613 or free 3605s.
I note that the anglophone vorticist magazine Blast[1], No 1 (1914) p.27, blesses france for its mastery of "rose" services.
An irony of the Minitel:
> "... à l’époque, les femmes à qui je racontais que j’étais donc payé pour faire fantasmer des hommes ... étaient plutôt séduites par ma façon de le faire ... paradoxalement, parler de mon boulot d’animatrice minitel rose était une super technique de drague."[2]
[1] https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf
[2] http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2...
There were a couple, a university AIX, a CDC NOS/VE with IP connectivity, etc...
Basically, free international comms back in the 90s!
this century's quest
It was back in 1997 with a pre-internet scene, the first IRL parties, internet friends, etc Basicly it was some smart guy hosting an atari st in the garage, with a dedicated telecom line (so 1 people connected at the same time!).
QSD was a 3rd party chat service, accessed Via minitel but with a per minute surchage. I met a lot of good friends their, swapped some postcards with some french girls. Great days.
I dont know how it came to be accessible via x.25 though.
My hand still remembers some NUA by heart even if I didn’t connect to these for 30 years.
Common people there: BayernPower, Gandalf, ... long time ago.
It was 0208057... something iirc.
EDIT: per hour, about 5C per minute, or 2.5C per minute. It's like a local call, then.
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881
2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141
2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531
2012 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360
Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html
The internet clearly predated Minitel. The big difference is that it was not initially used for commerce. It was to link the military with universities.
I joined Xerox in 1985. Two years earlier the network we were on converted from Arpanet to Internet. There might have been some group somewhere in Xerox that was still on the Arpanet but the military were worried about security so they created the Internet. You can call the exact date of the split between arpanet and internet as being the birth of the internet.
Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college.
Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.
The web made the internet easier to use - that is true. But before then we still had email and discussion boards and distribution groups. It was all text based and somewhat ugly.
Can you give me an example of a pre-web URL?
A lot of people call domain names URLs, which is where I thought the OP was going.
I don't think the vision of the minitel was to build an international network though, so there might not have been much interest in inter-connectivity I guess.
> "CWI established the first connection between Europe and the Internet on November 17, 1988."
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/613/53...
> "Not only were links within North America difficult to establish, but Dik Winter, from the Netherlands, describes how the first cross Atlantic Usenet link was delayed until 1982-1983 because of the difficulty of acquiring an autodialer modem that conformed to European standards. The mail link ... connected the site decvax at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the U. S. with mcvax at Mathematisch Centrum (MC) in the Netherlands."
Télétel was 1980.
a cold war poisson d'avril: https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html
Not at all true; I used to connect from the Centre Mondial in Paris via transpac to MIT-Multics to read my email in 1982. And that only worked because those links already existed.
suggests all may be true: TRANSPAC was X.25 (presumably terminated similarly at MIT? I know nothing about ITU.), USENET piggybacked on voice networks, and 1988 was presumably when regular IP packets started being routed.
suggests that international direct dial wasn't even widespread in the UK before the 1980's.
Genuinely curious about Internet history details. Thank you!
Amusingly, I learned about Minitel just a few hours ago when I stumbled upon this video from John Stossel's show (obligatory thanks to YouTube algorithm) where he mentions Minitel as an exhibit of government/public sector's failure to innovate and a way for the French government to 'control the growth' of this new technology before private players. Here's the video (with the exact time stamp) where Mr. Stossel talks about Minitel -- https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208
I then searched the web (through Google) for information on Minitel and this IEEE article showed up.
[edit] in any case, thanks for the link. That was an interesting read.
I wonder what he thinks ARPANET is an example of. (I don't)
The selective arguments he makes can usually be picked apart very easily, too.
The following are compatible with 80 columns:
Minitel 1B
Minitel 2
And type the following after power on to switch to 80 cols:
Function T+E
http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361
Use online translator and ping me if needed.
We use 50hz too.
I thought about doing it this way, but was rather planning to do it slightly differently, by building the right modulator (at, what was it? 2600 bauds? it should be pretty doable to bit-bang using an arduino, or the RPI's GPIO. Maybe even with a digital output, though I'm thinking of using a DAC. Or hell, if using a raspberrypi, why not the audio or video output?
Another option is to bypass the motherboard and use the CRT + keyboard. A friend of mine plans to do just that, and I saw someone post this link on your blog: http://www.cfp-radio.com/realisations/rea48/minitel-01.html
Well, that's for the plans... It's pretty unlikely I'll start this project before 6 months, as I have a lot on my plate :/
First mover isn't always an advantageous position to be in.
Interestingly, this one went back and forth, AIUI. The initial British (monochrome) standards, which was very early, was quite flawed; later US standards improved on that, then NTSC improved on those, then PAL and SECAM improved on that (and bounced off each other a bit; the version of PAL that was eventually released used concepts from SECAM).
France, being France, did its own thing on the colour transition; SECAM wasn't used anywhere else in Western Europe (SECAM was better than both PAL and NTSC for the end user, but was hard to work with and not commonly used).
British and Irish TV channels, incidentally, continued to broadcast the pre-PAL standard on separate frequencies until surprisingly late. I believe the Irish broadcaster only stopped in the _90s_, when their conversion equipment became unreliable.
(The "Never The Same Colour" retronym also suggests it was colour-related.)
Old black & white 819 lines was the more highly defined television system before HDTV.
I had proper 100Mbits/s fiber in Paris 10 years ago and I still can't get that in my part of London.
(I have no idea whether there was much politics content on minitel, but I've not heard of it, and would be interested in references)
The Minitel was inherently Peer-To-Peer but only one peer at a time.
But then to do that, it connected to a massive infrastructure that was there and running with very high availability constraints, ... for the time ;-)
I don't know what European values you could mean though. Business websites that close for lunch? :)
but 40 years ago it would've been 3 dutch and 7 english to 11 french.
Maybe it could be good for accessibility .... the concept of making modern websites into plain text just doesn’t work very well (I.e Lynx).
One story: They got more business use than you might otherwise expect because they didn't list what services you paid for on the bill. So businessmen were racking up larger charges for sex chatrooms and what have you without having to explain them to their company.
I worked on Beltel for a while, which was a South African copy of the UK version of this.
As in, South Africa got a copy of the code, and developed from there.
Ran over ordinary telephone lines using mostly 2400 baud modems to a client which was normally a terminal program running on a PC.
The code itself was VAX Pascal running on a set of DEC VAX VMS boxes (5 front-end boxes, and a dual-VAX backend cluster).
It was short for Réseau téléphonique commuté. Basically a simple user would run the equivalent of bbs software on his computer, but with specific tweak that it could talk in videotex encoding.
And then of course he would use a modem (even in hackish ways the modem of an existing Minitel) to answer calls on a normal phone line (no x25 here).
But these rarely did FIDO.
That was huge at the time.
Probably not, or else some people would focus more on providing an internet-ready equivalent to this than trying to make "GopherSpace" a thing.
BYTE Magazine's July 1983 issue was dedicated to videotex:
Who else reused old minitels as a display here ?
I remember it used with Atari ST and Amigas for online chat and file download (1200 bps download, 75 bps upload iirc)
English was the language of commerce and technology, but French being the language of diplomacy and intercommunication it would be a game changer on teleco.
But Minitel was a bit like an enclosed shell, like Gopher.
Now Gopher is the opposite, nobody needs a license to host a server.
But as the world increasingly globalized, there were a lot of forces to have a fairly universal language. And between the once huge British Empire and the industrial dominance of the US post-WWII, that language naturally became English.
It may not be that far fetched to imagine a 1930s internet ("The League of Thoughts") coming somewhat naturally in French.
----
Edit, on the technology of the LoT: This was some of a joint European effort. A crucial part was the storage of the analogue image signal on a continuously refreshed electrostatic drum, invented by Dr Ludwig Chevenmüller in the early 1920s. A major breakthrough was then the contribution of a young Tommy Flowers, who came up with a way to combine discrete signals suitable for relay-based automatic dialling with the analog signals that provided the content. In a somewhat parallel strain Thierry du Pont du Lac invented his "lecteur discret", which did much the same for character based signals in Baudot code, which was eventually combined in the vertical blank of the analog image signal and stored on the terminal side on a second drum, to be superimposed by a tiny typesetting machine and an array of electrostatic lenses onto the analog Chevenmüller image. (Alternatively, the combined image could be redirected onto a third drum, from which it could be printed using a technique similar to stencils. Seasoned users of the LoT may remember the typical smell quite well.) But the LoT only really took of, when BASF came up with a way to compress the Chevenmüller signal into rapid bursts, which enabled the rather astounding speed of the network.
What a ridiculous claim. The language spoken for Diplomacy is spoken by diplomats and has virtually nothing to do with what the population speaks. Just like Latin was the language of Religion and Science in Middle-Ages, but certainly not spoken by everyone else.
If you wanted a better future (lots of people headed to France to work), you would learn French to make a good chunk of money and cheap goods, period.
1- Spain is a neighbor to France, so it's hardly surprising that French is used a lot in the first place.
2- Spain represents less than 1% of the World population, so it's hardly a proof that French was used all over the world in the 70s.
By the Wikipedia numbers [1], French is the fifth most spoken language in the world by total number of speakers, yet only fifteenth by native speakers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
The costume drama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2-fkZ-0Blw claims that in the seventeenth century, the aristocracy would've been familiar with enough with their tenants' dances (indeed, preferring them to french court customs) to perform them themselves, but no matter what the historical accuracy of that portrayal, Tolstoy's take on the nineteenth century situation was different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace#Language .
https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Война_и_мир_(Толстой)/Том_I/Ч...
While you can have discussions about when it became ‘the internet’ ARPAnet was already an international network far before minitel launched and of course the language was English.
In 1992 visiting a friend's apartment in San Francisco, I had to explain to someone what the Internet was, whereas my friend who was on Compuserv didn't have to explain what Compuserv was.
Note that this thread has evolved / mutated so much that it no longer has any bearing on the question of whether "The French insisted on doing it all in French while the language of the Internet is English. They isolated themselves and could never have been the center of the web" (a question I have no interest in).
The point is that France was ahead of the US in conferring the benefits of computer-mediated communication and computer-mediated commerce to the average consumer.