The Minitel system in France (1988) | Hacker News Reader

The Minitel system in France (1988)

fermatslibrary.com

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As a French, I remember that absolutely every adult around me used to ridicule the minitel for its ugliness, slowness and overall lack of diverse use cases. At best, it was a slow Yellow Pages. At worst, sex services ("minitel rose", it was called).

Back in 202x, I see many times a year articles shared about the minitel, including here in HN, praising its ahead-of-time platform, glorified as a pre-internet era.

It is funny, in a fascinating way, how it is retrospectively revered.

My dad came one day in 1982 with one as they were given them for free. Plugged it, and gave me the manual to figure it out :)

The minitel is an anomaly a sort of black swan. One of those brilliant idea that is not obvious, maybe even not for its creators.

My mom (born in 1952) for the longest time was doing online shopping (La Redoute, CAMIF) through the minitel. She was doing her banking also through minitel.

I got my exam results through minitel... watching those lines appearing one by one was nail-bitting!

It was limited, but it still allowed my parents to do online shopping back in the 80's (40 years ago), and to some extent it put a lot of kids of my generation into computers. Even one French billionaire, Xavier Niel started with minitel "rose" (i.e. online porn) in mid-80's. The government paid for the R&D (CCETT) and the production (it was given for free at first). France was trying to come up with new technologies like the TGV (high speed train from 1981) or the phone card with EMV chip (1984) that you could use in booth to call (no more coins), and the minitel was one of them.

15 years later once at the University (like a mile away were the Minitel was born), my professor fondly reminded us the chaos when in 1985 the french government decided to distribute hundred of thousands of computers in all the schools, and that they had to train more than one hundred thousand teachers to computer science before the back to school. Fun times :)

> France was trying to come up with new technologies like the TGV (high speed train from 1981) or the phone card with EMV chip (1984) that you could use in booth to call (no more coins), and the minitel was one of them.

Don't forget Bi-Bop (1991), the French mobile phone before mobile phones were a thing. To use it you had to find the blue and green sticker that marked the location of an antenna and stand next to it.

The first ever Apple laptop with wireless connection was in fact done in collaboration with France Telecom, and was supposed to work with the Bi-Bop service, Very few were made (around 650) and sold, they were version of the PowerBook 180 with an added connection module and antenna (CT2 norm) in place of the internal floppy drive, and called PowerBop. It lasted a very short time before the Bi-Bop thing was abandoned. The remaining "PowerBop"s were sold at lower prices with the floppy drive reinstalled, but still having a weird notch in the case for the CT2 module... They are very sought after by collectors, as very rare . Got one from a Gentleman living near La Défense (Paris big business center) at the time, one of the few places where some Bi-Bop antenna were installed. Told me the thing worked, sure slow... he would sit under the antenna and check mails, and would feel like living in 2000s , but it was 1994... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBop

They tried something similar in the UK ("Rabbit") around the same time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)

So the French even had “Septembre éternel” before everyone else? ;)

I was a kid back then but I remember people liking it overall. The speed was standard for its time. The UX was quite good, in some way better than the web for people who had a hard time with computers (punch a number on your phone, press a button on the machine, enter a code, usually just a word or the company name) et voilà!

This needs to be put in perspective, it was the first network of its scale, and it preceded the web for interactive services. When it was rolled out personal computers were far from being a common thing in households, many people in the computer field believing that PCs were toys with not much purposes

> As a French, I remember that absolutely every adult around me used to ridicule the minitel for its ugliness, slowness and overall lack of diverse use cases.

It’s funny because I have exactly the opposite experience. I know people who used the Minitel professionally to order components until it was decommissioned well past after the introduction of an equivalent internet service and still complain that the UX was quicker to use.

It wasn't the look and feel that was impressive, it was what you could do with it. You could book train tickets, pay bills, do most interactions with government, order from catalog retailers. This at a time when most transactions in stores were paid by cheques still! Even after the Web exploded, it took almost a decade to get even close to the ubiquity of being able to do things _ONLINE_ everywhere else.

As for the sex services, I can only assume that they were wildly popular given the amount of money spent advertising 3615 ULLA on every train and bus. Given the French penchant for adultery, I expect it was quite a convenient service.

>Given the French penchant for adultery

I'm sorry what?

Let's keep in mind the minitel was launched in the early 80s, a long long time before the www. And by the 1990s websites design, it wasn't that ugly (most 56k modems also acted as minitel clients so you could use it on your computer).

It's only by the mid 2000s that it became obsolete as the www became mainstream.

When I look back at it, I think the lowest common denominator it provided ensured at the very least we did not have the huge variance in quality of websites we have today, the broken date widgets, the pointless animations and branding. When it comes to buying tickets online, I'd rather have something today that's as simple as the Minitel

It was slow and ugly by today's standards but you could still do actual e-commerce well before the web was ready, like buy a train ticket without having to talk to a human.

These kind of useful services were almost all provided by state owned entities (train tickets fit the bill). Other that train, you could also apply for national exams and get the results.

That's also why you ended up keeping a box in your home that only help in very specific occasions (except if you're taking the train two times a week), and most people would just go to the local post office to use the freely available Minitel when really needed.

I think the worst part was that many of these services were late to embrace internet partly because of the Minitel being a stopgap.

I've always heard that e-commerce was enabled by encryption (otherwise no one would type in their credit card / bank details over cleartext) -- what method did minitel use to take payment? Maybe you had an account with the vendor and they billed you out-of-band or something?

That was kinda the beauty of the minitel. You did not have to provide anything. The traffic coming from your telephone line was charged to your telephone bill.

That created some household drama... Who spent 200 francs on porn last month ?

I was carefully limiting my usage to free services, or paid services where I could cut (literally) the connection before the 1 or 2 free minutes. Memories...

My brother managed to spend 2000 Fr in a month, connecting at night. As you said big "household drama" when parents discovered the bill... But, I think he got his first date with Minitel help :D

In the 90s, one of the most expensive Minitel, the Magis, had a card reader on the side, probably working like a point of sale terminal. [0]

The overlay of X.25 Transpac network on IP for payment terminals was cut off 2 weeks ago. [1]

[0] https://wiki.labomedia.org/images/1/19/MinitelMagisClub.pdf

[1] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1543841021091528704

I've always heard that e-commerce was enabled by encryption (otherwise no one would type in their credit card / bank details over cleartext)

That's because the Internet is an open network where packets pass through multiple ISPs, you don't know what path packets will take, and sniffing packets is easy. Minitel was presumably a mostly closed system managed by a single telco who could keep out bad actors.

Minitel was a direct modem connection to the service, you also had a payment method on file with them. You weren't sending your credit card info in plaintext across the Internet. Being a direct modem connection, even if you had to provide card details, it would be no less secure than dictating them over the phone to an agent.

Anything you bought was charged to your telephone account.

Does the Internet not contain a vast amount of ugly design, slow pages, and sex services? That’s just a function of humanity, the medium it’s expressed through doesn’t alter that.

I think that many engineers laud the minitel network because it’s a legitimately separate design from the current internet monoculture which despite its seeming diversity on the surface, has some foundational technology that everyone uses. Like did minitel require using http? Did minitel have outages once or twice a year from a main provider wiping their bgp tables?

Those aren’t even sarcastic questions, I’ve only lightly learned about minitel but was fascinated because I’m under the impression that they took a different tech tree than what The Internet has

To what extent was the minitel widespread and commonly used by people compared to dialup BBSes? It's my understanding that one of the reasons why BBS became popular in the US was free unlimited local calling, within your local calling area, which could cover a fairly large metro city sized geographic area such as Seattle or Chicago.

In the beginning of the 90s I'd say there was a minitel in maybe 30% of homes in France (maybe a computer in <5%).

That was the preferred to look up a phone number / address, and checking exam results.

I was a kid/teenager at the time and I was forbidden from even touching the thing because it was so expensive to use.

well, as long as you were not dialing 3615, you were fine :)

There was an article in a major US publication around 2000 where the journalist mentioned that they'd recently been to Europe, and they had an amazing new thing there which was much better than the internet!

It was Teletext, which was introduced in 1974 and was certainly in decline by 2000.

What's wrong with sex services? Wouldn't expect the French of all people to be a bunch of prudes.

Money. Sex services cost a lot, and French people hate costly services with a passion.

Here in Italy Videotel was exactly how you describe it, plus tarot readers.

But I'm surprised, Minitel and to some extent, Prestel were touted as success stories even at the time.

That’s funny, I remember it as "that stuff you can book train tickets on" that only nerdy dads use, but mostly too expensive to be really useful :).

All the BBSes back in the day were awful, the key thing here is it was a network arguably targeted at normies before many other things like the web. Maybe AOL eventually too sure, but Compuserve was way more expensive and not a everyday person thing.

> All the BBSes back in the day were awful

Remember when Minitel was launched all computers were quite awful. A reasonable one would have an 80-column 25-line monochrome display, while most home computers had 40-columns and 24 or 25 lines (and some color). There were a couple graphics standards, such as Tek 4010/4 and ReGIS, but very few terminals supported them.

"Je ferai plus 36 15 ULLA"

Vachement beaucoup!

Could someone explain how Minitel apps worked in detail, or provide a link? I understand it's based on duplex serial communication over modem, yet isn't tty-like (not every keystroke is transferred) but then how does the terminal know at which point to expect/enable input fields, etc? Is it similar to 3270?

here is a blog post [1] that links to a terminfo file [2] written by Alexandre Montaron that might help. [1]: https://chapelierfou.org/blog/a-minitel-as-a-linux-terminal.... [2]: https://chapelierfou.org/files/mntl.ti

This FOSDEM conference from Frédéric Bisson might interest you: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/retro_revivin...

For all the french nerds on HN, there is a pretty nice TV show called « 3615 Monique ». The directing is heavily inspired by « The Social Network » but a bit more goofy at times. Of course, the whole plot is about students bootstrapping their own « pink » service…

Minitel, Nokia communicator smartphones, mp3 - I'm sure that's a non-exhaustive list of really cutting edge European technologies that weirdly failed to become big until something similar came from the US. Kind of strange, what is it that explains the crushing commercial success of US tech?

It's non exhaustive for sure, technologies evolve and if you cut at the american part of the evolution you can always say that. But see for instance if you say "without a Dutch company, no modern processor can be made today" does it mean there's a crushing commercial success of European tech that no American company could reach until we landed on it ? Are the americans so far behind us that they need Europe to built their CPUs ? Does it matter to say it like that ?

I had a minitel like all French people, it was a crushing commercial success as far as I could see and then the internet was just better. And one day a Chinese will make something else and that's fine :D

A really large, broadly homogeneous market that speaks one language?

and almost one century of soft power

Because the US had nerdy hackers that wanted to build companies and make stuff that people want.

Europe has nerdy hackers too, but they don't want to build companies, as it is considered bad taste here.

So actual hard talent plus wanting to build business success is enough you think?

An environment that makes it easy to start a business does help but is not strictly required.

So what is it then that explains the success delta between Intel and ARM, between Apple and Grundig, between Facebook and studiVZ, if it's not necessarily the business-friendly environment?

Grundig was founded 1930. It wasn’t managed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, it was managed by business people.

StudiVZ - Germany was too small of a market to get a global network effect going. I don’t know about the management but I’m pretty sure Facebook had better access to VCs, since VCs basically didn’t exist in Germany at that time. Which kind of is my point: Nobody wanted to start a garage startup, so there was no need for VCs.

So the US got a startup economy with black jack and Angels, while Europe is trying to do innovation through corporates (think go90).

Oh, and MBA copycats from Rocket Internet.

(Obviously I am exaggerating)

Oh! Wasn't Nokia and MP3 a thing in US?

Nokia smartphone success was so underwhelming commercially (tech-wise they were a decade ahead) that most consider the smartphone era to only have begun with the iPhone (that came almost a decade later).

mp3, which is just an audio code format, became a commercial hit mainly through US hard- and software (referring to the iPod and iTunes).

We had a derivative system in South Africa from the mid eighties onwards called BELTEL. It included a live chat where I met my first phone phreak friends and learned how to blue box and dial US BBSs free, along with hacking the phone company’s X.25 network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltel Crappy screenshot of the welcome page. https://twitter.com/t3xtm0de/status/785163802371301377?s=21&...

I always wonder why it didn't take off elsewhere. It was basically the 80s commercial version of a national "world wide web".

We had a knockoff using the same tech (even the same terminals) in the Netherlands but there was a hefty service fee per minute and it was hardly used. You could use a computer too but you needed a modem with this quirky 1200/75 baud mode (1200 baud down which was bog standard, but 75 baud up which was not). My 2400 baud modem couldn't do that (it could only do 300/300, 1200/1200 and 2400/2400) so I never used it.

Many European countries had their own version of this. Germany had Bildschirmtext (aka BTX), which failed mostly because the state controlled which terminal could be used, and it was metered in minutes, which in turn were expensive. The UK had Viewdata and later Prestel.

Yep, in Italy there was Videotel but it was rather expensive and never became popular (unlike the Minitel in France).

The (then public) telephone company did at some point allow connection also from "not-official-terminals" and particularly a suitable modem for the Commodore 64 (with 1200/75 baud v.23) was available and had a certain diffusion:

http://retrofficina4004.blogspot.com/2014/12/adattatore-tele...

Yeah ours was also called videotel. The phone company sold the terminals in their shops but by then it was already declining even in France. And the premium call rates were too high to make it worthwhile.

Also a lot of data was available on Teletext which was kinda the same idea just broadcast.

Actually no, it was "viditel"

I worked on Videotex systems in Holland (and basically deprecated it in 2001). At the time it was the profitable part of the ISP it was part of, largely due to the "pink" services it offered via paid dial-in numbers (0.25 Eurocents per minute). Later a web version of Videotex was created which basically emulated the Videotex screen in a http frame. Its services were quickly taken over by the Internet.

Setting up and running the MAME emulation of the Minitel 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30888451 - April 2022 (15 comments)

Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30743891 - March 2022 (32 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29922475 - Jan 2022 (124 comments)

Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004616 - Oct 2021 (2 comments)

Old School Minitel Laptop: 7 Steps (With Pictures) – Instructables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861842 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)

Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794257 - Oct 2021 (3 comments)

The Rise and Fall of Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507260 - Dec 2020 (23 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24439744 - Sept 2020 (196 comments)

Log on Like It’s 1985: A Fragment of Minitel Returns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18781820 - Dec 2018 (9 comments)

Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16263093 - Jan 2018 (67 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401405 - Oct 2017 (15 comments)

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561 - July 2017 (107 comments)

Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881 - June 2017 (53 comments)

Minitel, France's precursor to the Web, to go dark 30/6/12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175141 - June 2012 (32 comments)

Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170531 - June 2012 (21 comments)

How France fell out of love with Minitel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088360 - June 2012 (1 comment)

France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733106 - July 2011 (46 comments)

There’s a Platform Studies book about Minitel, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet.” I haven’t read it yet, but so far I have a more-than-half rate of enjoying Platform Studies books, so I’m hoping.

Back in the 80s there used to terminal similar to this in bay area BART stations. Sluggish text and line graphics. I forget what they used to be called.

Does anyone have any details on how these systems worked, in contrast to the web?

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