Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017)

There's still a Minitel today: it's the Apple ecosystem.

Minitel demonstrated regular people were willing to buy services on a machine (phone, phone-like terminal, computer) and use it as part of their normal lives.

Fun story: at the time TCP/IP did not ship standard with Windows, so we had to ship CD-ROMs with installers for WinSock, along with a browser (initially Netscape, then IE because it had much better provisioning tools, not because of Microsoft's dirty tricks though they certainly tried). My colleague who was responsible for this was clearly so traumatized he shortly later left the company and joined the Catholic priesthood...

Then, I'd ask the minitel site to send me by fax the doc I wanted to read and it would call me and print on fax via the same emulator lol

The next few months, EVERYTHING moved to the internet and this stopped being necessary, but it was kinda cool... and HORRIBLY expensive vs the internet.

Advertisements for Minitel services would say something like "Dial 3615 HOTSTUFF to meet a passionate lover". A lot of these services were adult chat, games, or extremely low-res porn, and it was easy to rack up a massive phone bill by connecting to them (you'd have to remember to disconnect, too!). Another very common use cases was phone book lookups.

Think of it as a physical terminal for a ncurses-style terminal app using a remote client, with the display updating line by line with a scanning cursor as you received data. There's an example of what that looked like in this short documentary about Minitel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUmxUB9RhI&t=500s – every single page loaded line by line that way.

Now I’m curious if the Home Alone screenwriter watched it.

For some this is not some abstract notion but a real worry. I am glad the internet started decentralised.

Certainly, Minitel was not a secretive Silicon Valley-styled company with dual class shares or other entrenching governance structures, that allow for concentration of voting power in the hands of company insiders, through disproportionate allocation of voting rights among shareholders.

It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do.

Regardless of the public opinion toward telecom, it has historically been subject to far more regulation than so-called "tech" companies operating websites. Sadly, some of today's telecom companies try to emulate or piggyback on the privacy violating behaviour of "Big Tech".

Centralisation/decentralisation is an interesting debate, but if the issue is privacy then, IMO, one also needs to consider the question of regulation/deregulation.

Perhaps Minitel was an example of a regulated, government-supported public computer networking service that worked very well.

Silicon Valley and its charlatan ideology is a privacy disaster. It is probably a threat to the survival of democratic societies as we know them.

What's abstract about it?

Also in France, 15 is medical services, 17 is the police and 18 are the firefighters. By calling 112 anywhere in Europe you'll get an English speaking operator that can dispatch any emergency service.

In Brazil (São Paulo) we had a similar, Minitel-based, system. No online dating, but I met my first wife in a chatroom. It also had banking and you could transfer money to different banks with it. Initially I got an MSX computer with a modem (at that time the telco rented out the computer instead of a dedicated terminal for a ridiculously low fee), which was also useful for connecting to local BBSs.

Later on I gave the MSX back (should never have done that - it was an unremarkable computer, but a pretty good videogame) and added a V.23 modem to my Apple II+ clone. The system continued to evolve, started accepting 1200 and 2400 bps inbound connections (which made it more accessible, because V.23 modems were not easy to come by). Last time I used it was with Windows 95 and its terminal software.

Legend says the system ran on Multics on a Honeywell-Bull mainframe, making me an actual Multics user.

But the French bootstrapped the ecosystem by giving everyone who wanted it a free minitel instead of a printed directory which didn't happen in the UK, due to that Prestel never really took off.

Was called Viatel.

Xavier Niel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel) started his empire with a sex oriented chat service.

It was highly pushed by the national telco. The telco lent terminals for free so they were easily available, and there were tons of useful services, especially but not only from national companies: starting from the 80s you had stocks, online shopping, travel reservations, information services, message boards, databases[0], games, dating sites, ...

Monetisation / payment was integrated from the start, through the phone bill: just like premium-rate phone numbers, minitel had premium-rate services (both first and third party), so you could make money out of valuable services. It was nothing compared to the modern web (~25000 services and about $1bn revenue at its height), but for the mid-80s to mid-90s and out of a population of 60m it was quite massive.

[0] trying to get rid of phonebooks was a big reason for minitel in the first place

Do you mean for digital technologies or for specifically DSL? As I remember up to 1996 there was no commercial DSL in France, but there were excellent ISDN coverage (with rate up to 128kbits/sec with two channels). However it was quite expensive and when DSL was commercialized in France, it was cheaper at the basic rate of 512Kbits/sec. ISDN commercialization started around 1988 in France. In 1996 the Network part of FT started to think how to open the network to higher bandwidth, and it was not so easy because the internal backbone was built on ATM as it was used by Minitel users. Some years later (2002?) with declining Minitel revenues, FT decided to give the priority to DSL, with an adequate IP backbone.

(Source: It's only from my memories, I was involved in Rennes' 1987 ISDN experiment, network organization in 96-98 and commercialization of ISDN and later DSL, in Brittany, from 1998 to 2002)