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Worth reading a bit about France's Minitel, it was an amazing electronic network introduced in 1982.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

"Millions of terminals were handed out free to telephone subscribers, resulting in a high penetration rate among businesses and the public. In exchange for the terminal, the possessors of Minitel would not be given free "white page" printed directories (alphabetical list of residents and firms), but only the yellow pages (classified commercial listings, with advertisements); the white pages were accessible for free on Minitel, and they could be searched by a reasonably intelligent search engine; much faster than flipping through a paper directory."

I had a BIX account! For me it was one of the cheapest ways to get Internet access (pre-web).

It was noteworthy for the coding discussions.

On-line services back then _were_ expensive. I recall GEnie (a Compuserve wannabe) asking $5/hr in 1990.