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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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