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 :)