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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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?

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.

> 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)

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

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.

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

> 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

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.

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