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.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm sorry what?
It's only by the mid 2000s that it became obsolete as the www became mainstream.
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.
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
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...
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 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
That was the preferred to look up a phone number / address, and checking exam results.
It was Teletext, which was introduced in 1974 and was certainly in decline by 2000.
But I'm surprised, Minitel and to some extent, Prestel were touted as success stories even at the time.
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.