The Rise and Fall of Minitel | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Minitel

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Today in France the most active internet provider "FREE" CEO Xavier Niel, got rich at the time of Minitel...

He came from the east poor suburb of Paris and got suddendly rich by making 'minitel web pages'.

Later he reinvested all its money to build one of the biggest internet provider : free. It made it a billionaire.

And later again ( 7 years ago) France biggest startup investor with kima venture https://www.kimaventures.com

So yes, Minitel was in a way the start of France starupnNation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel

> In 1987 at 19, while dropping out from school, he successfully created then sold his first company, a Minitel (a French forerunner of the internet) service company. This minitel-site provided sex oriented chat services.

I suppose some backup of these services still exists today, I'd really like to see them published some day on https://archive.org/

If we're doing his biography, he also created "42", a free (as in, "you don't need to pay any money") coding bootcamp based on the principles and general philosophy of the school Epitech.

It's a very project-oriented cursus, where the students have total freedom to decide how they work as long as they pass the very strict requirements of each project. To keep costs down, students have to grade each other and use mostly automated resources.

I'm not sure if the school is sustainable (I think it's supposed to be funded by alumni donations), but it's a really cool venture.

They recently opened a chapter in California.

Another HN thread about ecole 42 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18269783

> They recently opened a chapter in California.

I heard instead recently that they are closing the California chapter that they opened 3/4 years ago.

What is all the more remarkable about Xavier Niel’s success is that he did not emerge from the narrow path of prestigious secondary and university schools that famous French people usually come from. Most of the time, anyone who is anyone in France comes from a handful of elite educational institutions. If you don’t have the right academic pedigree, the powers that be won’t give you the time of day.

It's worth noting that he became rich by being a minitel pimp. He served prison for this.

I recently watched 3615 code Père Noël, a film where Minitel had a small but key role [0]. It's from 1989, when Minitel was still very much ubiquitous. I've also heard mention of it on Archer [1].

I didn't realize the French got free Minitel terminals. I wonder if there were subscription fees associated with it, like you get the 1000 hours free AOL disk, but eventually you'll have to pay for the service and you gotta pay for the phone time regardless...

0 - https://filmxposure.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/3615-code-pc...

1 - http://www.tzr.io/yarn-clip/217d0345-4b02-4b05-8d57-77536015...

Some numbers you could dial for free, like the phone directory pages (if you stayed under 3 minutes). Some services were billed by the minute, like phone calls were.

Somehow ... if I squint a bit.. the minitel model is an appstore.

It's more akin to a web browser in the dial-up era (from both the pricing and technical standpoints). Or any of the paid phone services (porn, alarm) or texting services (buy ringtones, ...) of the same period.

Seems more BBS than I had thought it was. Are these numbers just like regular French phone #s or were they a mintel-specific access mechanism?

Also what was French voice phone service billed like back then? Did you have to pay per minute for non-local calls (or all calls, even)?

There were regular phone numbers, you had to call these numbers with the phone (no dialer on the minitel). All voice calls were billed per minute, variying by distance ("local" vs "national") and by the time of the day (cheaper on weekends or after 7PM).

> There were regular phone numbers, you had to call these numbers with the phone (no dialer on the minitel).

That's incorrect. There was a dialer on later versions of Minitel. And while you could technically set up a V23 BBS-like server behind a regular phone line to talk to Minitel terminals, the whole business model relied on the use of premium short numbers (361X) whose revenue was shared between France Telecom and service providers.

It was absolutely an App Store model and fortunes were made at that time.

Internet didn't have much paid services in mind at first. At least in my view, it was document/pages sharing. But I admit my analogy is fuzzy.

>Somehow ... if I squint a bit.. the minitel model is an appstore.

Yes, in the sense that the French phone company handled all billing. So each month's phone bill showed all Minitel charges. This greatly simplified startups getting started.

At the same time, Minitel did not use the CompuServe/AOL model of centralized data hosting; each provider (whether large company or small startup) hosted its own data.[1] This gave startups flexibility by being able to quickly roll out new and updated data and offerings without having to wait for a third party.

[1] Part of the rationale for Minitel was for France to avoid dominance by American technology companies like IBM. Unfortunately for such a goal, Minitel providers generally used American technologies like Unix.

Price was by the minute and varied with the phone number to call : 36 11 (phone directory) was free for a while (20 minutes IIRC), then cheap. Most services were running under 36 15; some (for instance Air France) were available both at 36 14 (cheaper) and 36 15. More expensive services like porn or some professional services were 36 17 or 36 18 (very expensive, something like 1€/minute).

Fun fact: 3614/3615 AIRFRANCE was much faster and easier to use than www.airfrance.com well into the 3rd millenium.

> Price was by the minute and varied with the phone number to call

Sounds like a plot for another horror movie ;-)

I'll show myself out.

I have to ask, did you watch 3615 code Père Noël on Joe Bob Brigg’s?

I watched it on Shudder a few days ago, and have to say it had quite the enjoyable selection of late 80s tech.

I was also surprised to learn that it is allegedly the inspiration for the movie Home Alone.

And, the significance of the four digits 3615 - was a common prefix for Minitel services?

It seemed like a more mature, coordinated implementation of a network of BBSs.

If curious, lots more Minitel:

2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744

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

2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106

Minitel evolved from the British Prestel system, which in turn evolved into Videotex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex#Australia

I remember when Videotex was very popular in Australia (Telecom's Viatel and Microtex666).

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electronics-Today/Aust...

The comparative initiative in Germany was BTX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext

In the United Kingdom, I think, the respective effort was Prestel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel

"The Computers Chronicles" had an episode about it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUx7dP2S7h4

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