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The First App Store

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186 pointsjvrossb45 comments

Really the most annoying conclusion possible in the article: "The free market wins again."

The free market gets to win after sufficient government handouts gets something up and running. Then private businesses can swoop in and take the networks (or in this case, the concept) and claim that they won.

If your mother gives you a lollipop, you didn't win an epic battle for the lollipop. Just saying...

While I definitely agree with you on the whole, there are some specifics that are ignored by your comment.

The French Minitel system allowed for semi-free market activities, by allowing companies to use the system.

The German Bildschirmtext failed because it apparently kept too much control: the decoder boxes were expensive and only able to be purchased at one location, and I don't think they allowed for others to use the service.

Completely agree with you.

If it's time to capitalize something, bring in the free market.

However if you need to build something that's never been built before, you tend to need a government, a tyrant, or a Rockefeller.

Minitel was not something that had "never been built before", there were Videotex systems developed before. Of course, it's hard for a private company to use tax money to offer free terminals to everyone.

> However if you need to build something that's never been built before, you tend to need a government, a tyrant, or a Rockefeller.

Well said, well said.

I agree with the Tyrant part.

I suppose it depends on your perspective. One could just as easily say that the free market won despite the activity of government.

This was perhaps the Minitel's greatest failure as well - because it was state run... The free market wins again.

If the Minitel launched in the eighties, how could have this article been written in the fifties?

Seriously, are Americans still fighting commies? What is this sick obsession with "the gobment"? Today we know we need both the private market and the government to build an economy that is both prosperous and beneficial to the people. Could you cut this fifties crap already?

And this wasn't a case of the "free market" winning again. This was just America winning again. And given that the US median income is steadily dropping while in France it's steadily rising, I don't know if there's much to be proud of.

  And this wasn't a case of the "free market" winning again. This was just America winning again.

Could you propose alternative explanations at to why the Minitel failed despite the fact it had such a head start? Do you think the internet would have prospered as it did if the only way to access it through the present day was through terminals developed, built, and lent to you by the American Gov't?

  Today we know we need both the private market and the government to build an economy that is both prosperous and beneficial to the people.

Elaborate? I think it's still hotly debated and certainly not 'known'.

I think the fact that managed to call out the 22 year old French author (me) as a 50s era frenzied McCarthyist betrays a stronger, far more irrational ideology in you than is present in my writing. I'm extremely proud of the Minitel and its amazing run (a sentiment shared by other commenters) and simply shared what I believe to be the most plausible and strongest explanation as to why it didn't make it's way out of France and eventually failed.

I don't know why the Minitel failed while the Internet didn't. But the internet started out as a government project, too[1]. Maybe it was because the American government-led effort incorporated the private market better, although, according to your description in the article, the French adopted what was to become Apple's model, and Apple is doing alright so far. And maybe it was due to other reasons, like being ahead of its time, or lack of an international marketing effort (why did the Apple Newton fail?) But in your article you give no compelling evidence to suggest that the Minitel's eventual failure was just a result of it being "state run". Both the internet and the Minitel were state run, and both had a strong private market participation.

If anything, the internet had a very long incubation period in the education system, while the Minitel immediately reached out to businesses. Governments usually don't shine in running businesses, but they do know how to build infrastructure; both the internet and the Minitel are infrastructure, so there's no reason to assume it would fail because it's state-run.

Whatever the reasons, they were more complex than this simplistic explanation (actually, it seems like the main reason is that the internet was already pretty big when Minitel launched – just not in homes – and couldn't be stopped at that stage).

> I think it's still hotly debated and certainly not 'known'.

The measure at which government should regulate the market is debated and varies across countries, but history has proven again and again that neither completely government controlled economies, nor completely free market economies work. We do know that.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Working backwards, the Minitel failed because in 2012 when it was discontinued it was hardly different from its 1983 incarnation. I agree it isn't likely to be a single-cause explanation, but when you examine the history of the Minitel and the ways it failed to adapt, it becomes evident that a huge factor at play was that the Minitel didn't have to respond to market pressures.

In the early 1990s US West (previously Qwest now CenturyLink) launched a Minitel service in the Minneapolis and Omaha markets called "CommunityLink"... The service was fairly short-lived as competing offerings from providers like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe provided more services targeted at American users for a lower price. Many of US West's Minitel offerings were charged à la carte or hourly while competitors offered monthly all-inclusive pricing.

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

Errm.. cough .. The American BBS Revolution.

MiniTel 'failed' because at the time, in the American market, it was competing with, well .. seriously better technology. If you even thought about some service like miniTel, in the US, and then went looking .. you got straight to the BBS section of CompuMag, &etc. The French had miniTel, hosted services, whereas in BBS-land, if you had a modem, you could serve. And .. serve you did.

However, in true -retro spect, MiniTel was brilliant. A Walled Garden, if not the first.

it arrived too late all over the world. teletexto... and some other names i forgot, around where i grew up.

But by the 90's BBS were already dominant. And several people already had much more capable PCs to be satisfied with monochromatic text. I remember the most popular BBS all had clients that showed client side graphics for the menu text received. and that was 1993 or so. People already laughed when i told about 2400baud modems anecdotes then.

This article does not mention that the Minitel was a rip-off. All services were extremely expensive (3617 being the most expensive, at around 1€/minute). It was also investing on people's credulity at the time: for example, expensive Minitel services avdertised in video games magasines targeting teenagers.

And for information, Free is not the largest ISP in France, Orange is.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_%28soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9%29

.. and thus, the analog with the modern App Store is complete.

Explain? The Appstore is the cheapest way outside open source I can get polished software and games at the moment. For a lot of great products in there i'm not even sure how the creators of that software can survive considering their pricing. Of course there are exceptions, but you can use most of those exceptions for free or less than the cost of 1 cup of coffee in a coffeeshop. So what do you mean by analog? E1 per minute to use (use!) or free/almost free to use?

Perhaps he was referring to the games which convince credulous kids to spend hundreds on in-app purchases?

Yup. The modern App Store highlights the exploitative nature of this business - just as MiniTel did, too, in the 80's .. Microsoft in the 90's, perhaps .. and so on. Sobering truth: there is a lot of crud software being made in these markets.

I agree with you as long as we are talking about mobile application stores. The Mac store proposes a lot of over-priced applications, including many applications that used to be free prior to the store release.

Makes me proud to be French.

Xavier Niel is launching a tuition-free developer school:

http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/03/26/rumor-confirmed-xavie...

The FT also recently had lunch with him:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/22167134-b24a-11e2-8540-00144feabd...

  History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

(misattributed to) Mark Twain

"History repeats itself, heaven knows I'll know it in the next world", End of Green, Kerbdog, Cormac Battle.

  Online dating has just started going mainstream in America.
  The Minitel might explain a cultural difference or two between
  the French and the rest of the world...

Ironically, in my experience online dating carries much less stigma in the US than in France. I'm not sure I agree with the implications of the article on the impact of the Minitel in France as a whole either, but then I'm too young to have witnessed it firsthand (I always saw one sitting in a corner at my grand parents', but that's about it).

I grew up in France, and was completely surprised when I learned that Minitel was something only in France. This was really the first internet, and the Minitel was really present EVERYWHERE. My parents had one, my friends' parents had one, we had a few at my elementary school.

I still remember the billboards, 3615 ULLA, funny memories. We still use the "3615" number as jokes with friends.

It was hugely expensive for the consumer: 3615 was a phone number, and it was surtaxed at 0,34€/min if I remember well, even as early as 1995. No wonder the market was a billion dollars, it was a rip off.

Internet killed the milking cow, and everyone wondered how Yellow Pages could survive when they couldn't charge per minute anymore...

As an owner of a collection of old Minitel-compatible 8-bit machines (my 'nicest': an Oric Telestrat), I yearn for a return of Minitel. I imagine actually that the "Internet 2.0" movement would do well to make it feasible for anyone to create a node, and participate in, a MiniTel-like local area transmission network, with cheap .. like ultra-cheap .. parts and technologies.

If I collect two months of electronic trash from the local garbage-collector, I'm fairly sure I could reconstruct a miniTel'ish network, or 10, in short order.

Perhaps I should stop thinking about it on HN and just go do it, but see .. this is just another reason why the French are great!

Oh yes, I remember reading about the Minitel many years ago. Thanks for bringing it back to attention.

The fall of these old technologies leave behind a somewhat somber mood in me. Kind of like the decline of UUCP.

This is amazing and thank you for sharing; As API said in another comment. I wish i was alive during those days and also alive today. I hope I'll be saying it about our future, but there is something about the nostalgia, I just fixed desperately needed box with ribbons and remembered how much I loved it when i was younger..(fixed it btw.)

[edit] There was zero credit to government persons, which I kinda feel lacking.. Someone was thinking here.

Old computers don't die, their users do. If you look, you will discover that all the old machines of the 80's are indeed still alive and well, and actually .. getting new software written for them. Yes, kids, its a fact: the c64 is a thriving platform. The Oric-1/Atmos? Also! /r/retrobattlestations much, I do!?

As a child, I spent hours on the minitel, (disconnected - I never got the permission to use it online as it was very expensive) just to type ascii art...

That's funny, as far as I remember the keyboard on the model I had, was 'A B C D...' and not azerty as pictured in the above article.

I'm sure a 'A B C D' keyboard lowered dramatically the barrier of entry for the intended market (If I remember it right).

How did I not know about this?!?

I've heard about it plenty before. But never that the machines and basic service was free!

I don't think the machine were free. You could either rent it for cheap, or buy it. There was a few revision of the hard too, but most people had a semi-old revision like v2 or v3 (don't remember exactly). Maybe in the 2000 the old Minitels were given to those who rented it previously, that way the government (well, the now public telecom company France Telecom) did not have to recycle them all...

The only free service was the Yellow and White pages IIRC. And only for 3 minutes. Well, you could always disconnect when approaching the 3 minutes limit, then reconnect. Nobody spends whole days on the Yellow and White Pages anyway :)

There was a free one, I'm pretty sure.

Not remember exactly which years but I remember my parents having to wait to get one (vs. paying and getting it immediately).

There was a thriving hardware market for the miniTel machines (something different about the Walled Gardens of Now, I suppose) and I recall there being some seriously nice designs. Ultimately the Minitel was a dumb terminal, but like so many of the technologies at the time, what this meant was usually just a matter of flicking a few bits.

Remember also that the 8-bit revolution was going on in the computer world at the time. A lot of savvy French got 8-bit machines they could program, or load up "MINITEL.ROM", if they wanted. One of the reasons that the Oric-1 hardware even managed to live an extra few years before completing the 8-bit apocalypse, was because the French market for nice computers that could also access MiniTel was thriving.

We had Viditel in the Netherlands which was like this (modelled after it I guess). I used it very briefly in the early 80s; after that I discovered ways to use Pascal and assembler to write BBS software and opened my first BBS on my MSX computer. That gave so much freedom that I never considered Viditel again.

Very cool, shame I wasn't aware of this, even though I live near France (.nl) and visted there for years...

I think "Bildschirmtext" was a similar service that launched around the same time in Germany and also foreshadowed a lot of what the internet is now. Online shopping, forums, real time messaging, online dating, etc.

The UK had a similar thing run by the BBC called Ceefax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax

Ceefax was a teletext service, it ran on your TV, you couldn’t actually send data over it. Prestel was the UK’s videotex service, similar to Minitel.

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

Sadly Prestel just never had the penetration of Minitel. As an Englishman who came-of-age in the 1980's I wasn't aware of anyone with Prestel, it was too expensive. I remember my dad, who was pretty keen on technology (we had a sonic remote control for our TV I'll have you know) saying that they needed to make it's use free, even if you have to rent the kit. Charging for calls meant you had to think before you did and in the early 80's had any idea what you would do with it. They needed to be allowed to play for free first.

Minitel was Videotex (2-way) and Ceefax was Teletext (1-way). More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex

great story, but now what do you think apple allow this all stuff?

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