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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)?

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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.

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