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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

If anything it was so far ahead of the early web that it hindered adoption of the WWW in France. It was incredibly good and rich, many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers. It took at least until 1996 before the web could compete and by that time France reluctantly started to let go of their beloved tiny terminals. It took until 2012 (!!) before it was finally decommissioned, but by then there really wasn't much left of it to be turned off.

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I was inspired by the Minitel to start Esurance in 1997. The Minitel of course had porn (more Craigslist type "offerings" from real people) but also reservations, travel, and...INSURANCE! You are totally correct, it was so efficient that it delayed the adoption of the worldwide web. Of course France wanted something in FRENCH (!). As I was raising money in Europe for Esurance, the French executives would look down on me and say "we have the Minitel, we want nothing to do with your Internet" :-)

Not really. I worked for France Télécom's Wanadoo ISP division and the Minitel guys tried to sabotage us at every opportunity, including getting the head of our first division CEO Roger Courtois, but they did not manage to slow the progress, even though at the time they had $1B/year in revenues. The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany.

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...

> The bigger hindrance was relatively low PC penetration compared to the UK, Netherlands or Germany.

Wasn't that, in part, due to the fact that many people in France already had a Minitel at home?

In pre-internet times the purpose of a PC was quite different from electronic communication, so I’d guess people ought to have them anyway… It’s a good question, though, why was that.

In those days doing things by computer wasn't ubiquitous anyway (due to expense, lack of social/peer pressure, and fewer people were trained to use computers). So it was still common to hand write formal letters so such like.

This meant that even those on older hardware like 8-bit micros with monospaced dot matrix printers were still at an advantage. So people often ran with older hardware for longer.

It wasn't really until a combination of PC gaming taking off (particularly with 3D games that consoles of the same era couldn't compete with) and the WWW that many Europeans started taking IBM-compatible machine upgrades seriously.

It's only partly true, many people indeed have a Minitel at home, because it was free to have one (like it was free to have a landline phone). You only had to pay for the usage. And there was great services not yet available on WWW : find the train timetable, find the phone number of someone, chat with a (fake) sexy girl...

As for the PC penetration, there was many, but most of them where not ready for network usage : Commodore, Amstrad, Amiga, Thomson and first generation IBM-PC with MS-DOS. Only the last Amiga, Macintosh and IBM compatibles had the software to use a modem (Thomson had included a Minitel as dual bot in some of their computer instead).

There was no need for internet or to change the computer when WordPerfect, Multiplan and games still work perfectly. At the time, the pricey computer than you bought in the 80's was still good enough in the 90's...

I think than what had incite people to get a computer with modem is not WWW but email (with was not a Minitel feature). The real thing than Minitel hindred in France are Bulletin Board Systems. They where never really a thing in France.

For the curious, there are still a few unofficial Minitel services available : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-serveur_Minitel All you need is a Raspberry Pi and a modified Minitel...

> The real thing than Minitel hindred in France are Bulletin Board Systems. They where never really a thing in France.

As a Frenchman who spent most of my high school evenings on demoscene-oriented BBSes like A.C.E., Dune and Eden, I'll beg to differ and raise this : http://web.fdn.fr/~musical/bbsf.txt

I only heard of BBS twice in my youth, even if I was kind of a nerd, it was really a niche thing, wasn't it ? I wonder how BBS worked in those days.

not listed here but some guys owned old ATARI computers on which they implemented Minitel servers with a toll free phone number. Some were famous for their HP48 calculator community (and were in relationship with HP to organize HP Party) Most famous names were RTC ONE and PULSAR. They were really a pre-internet community with forum & chat. Crazy people at crazy times and exciting time in my life.

I spent a good proportion of my youth using a modem on C64/C128 connecting to BBSs.

> You only had to pay for the usage

Worth noting there were free services too. The most notable was the white/yellow pages at number 11 (later 36 11), although it was only free for the first 3 minutes, but it usually didn't take that long to find what you wanted. Or if it did, you could just reset the connection.

If i remember well, you still had to pay for the phone call to the service, even if the service itself was "free".

IIRC, 11 was fully free, including the phone call. Edit: I think the vocal equivalent (where you had an actual person at the other end, that could even connect you to the number you were asking for, was free too)

MS Windows 3.11 came with TCP/IP winsocks, MS Windows 3.1 didn't

but that was the same for all countries

I had the painful job of getting Windows running with netware ie IPX also with TCP/IP

I remember those days, travelling with a Win 3.1 laptop and a PPP stack with Winsock.dll to use dial-up in various countries. And 1-1 direct text chat apps.

> MS Windows 3.11 came with TCP/IP winsocks, MS Windows 3.1 didn't

Not really, Windows For Workgroups 3.11 offered an addon called Wolverine [0] but it wasn't even included by default AFAIK. Win95 is where TCP/IP support became normal for Windows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#Windows_for_Workg...

jeez my memory is playing up, I must have installed it by default whilst setting all the other crap up.

Like installing Office on 35+ disks

And it solved a problem I’d argue the internet hasn’t solved yet: how to charge users securely, easily and for small amounts. The way it did that is through your phone bill, since the minitel was using your phone line. No credit card number to enter (and be hacked), no credentials to enter. Of course it also meant kids had access to it…

Web Monetization, Coil.com, Interledger are trying to solve that same problem [1] but honestly It's doubtful it will work.

1 - I've written about this here https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati... and it was widely, if mostly negatively, discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26375857

Yes and Paypal and Flattr and so many others tried the same thing before, it's nothing new and nothing interesting. If you've read the mostly negative comments on your thread, i don't need to explain again why that's a terrible idea :-)

Because the phone network can't be hacked, perhaps? Also in my views, that something cannot be monetized is a feature, not a bug: trying to monetize WWW/email is precisely what led to the horrors we know today of mass advertisement and surveillance.

> Because the phone network can't be hacked, perhaps?

No comment.

It is because it cannot be monetised that we have mass advertisements. Some websites would be viable economically without advertising if they could seaminglessly charge a modest amount to customers.

Advertisement is a form of monetization. Now the question is about what you mean with "viable economically". Operating a website is pretty cheap and many non-profits are happy to do it for you for free, for a free-price, or for a membership due (usually 5-20€/year).

If you're trying to get an income from operating a website (or any other creative activity for that matter) that's a different matter. That's what i was referring to with "monetization". I personally believe that we as a species would be better off if less energy was spent trying to monetize everything and more into providing actual services to actual people.

The first thing I did when we got a computer at home with a modem was... to login to the minitel with my computer via an emulator downloaded on the internet, because all the cool stuff was there !! Mostly french video game guides since I was 11 lol

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.

> many services that could be used by non-technical people and had a built in monetization system for information providers

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.

Why singleout apple, when our lives are surrounded by digital subscriptions from a lot of other companies too? Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze etc, etc...

Because Apple has an ecosystem, whereas the others you mentioned live within someone else’s ecosystems.

Because the Minitel was completely vertivally integrated.

The terminals, software it ran (as the "OS"), Network and billing were all handled by one entity. And only this entity could approve software for distribution. It was a completely centralized walled garden.

Office, Netflix, Youtube Premium, Spotify, Blackblaze can all run anywhere, and on platforms such as Windows are free to do their own distribution.

If you're familiar with french language, some people argued that most of the "Internet" we use today is in fact technically, politically and economically closer to the Minitel. I'm of course refering to Benjaming Bayart's "Internet Libre ou Minitel 2.0" conference from 2008 which gave birth to the non-profit ISP federation (FFDN).

I still think it's better for the average people. It's also frugal oriented. You won't have youtube or google maps but for simple searches or orders I think it was peak. Just give it a speed bump and you're good.

Zero eye candy, and 1KB pages. Imagine how fast those would load on today's hardware.

8 colors is plenty eye candy :)

all solar powered on an esp32 thingie

ESP32 is way too powerful compared to a Minitel. They had zero processing power and simply drew to the screen whatever was typed/received.

then it will host 128 virtual minitels to dispatch onto attiny85 oled displays

Actually it was similar in Germany with BTX. But also during the time where it was reasonably usable (~'96) it was way faster and cheaper than going on the Internet. BTX was shut down in 2007 though

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