Oxymoron: Interesting Computer History

by philg

“Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet” (Atlantic) is worth reading (though I wish that someone could find good videos of people actually using Minitel terminals). Minitel is a good reminder that most stuff that folks do on the Web today was already happening on the Minitel system in the 1980s. Programmers aren’t smarter today. We only look smarter because the hardware engineers have given us so much more power (most of which we turned around and wasted!).

13 thoughts on “Oxymoron: Interesting Computer History”

  1. From the article:
    “Similar systems in the U.S., such as The Source, DowJones, Compuserve, and AOL, were only accessible to the wealthy, geeky few.”
    Why is this fake SJW clap-trap? They forgot Prodigy! CompuServe, AOL, and such were priced at from $5 per month for limited use to $20 per month for unlimited use. That is just ridiculous.

  2. Anonymous: I think Minitel, for those who were heavy users, actually cost a lot more than AOL, et al. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18610692 makes it sound as though it was somehow subsidized for the poor, but http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/news/beyond-minitel-france-on-the-internet.html (when Bill Clinton was in office so America had social justice out the wazoo!) says “it costs more than nine francs a minute to consult a newspaper data base ” (that was $1-2 per minute). http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/computers-minitel-made-the-world-my-huitre-france-telecoms-information-service-1437140.html suggests that Minitel content providers had various clever ways of adding sizable charges to consumers’ phone bills.

  3. I confirm Minitel usage was expensive. The terminal was given away thanks to tax payers money but then you paid by the minute. There were various pricing depending on the phone number used to access the network (3614, 3615, 3617).
    Even for the phone directory you only had the first 3 minutes for free.

  4. Why is this fake SJW clap-trap? They forgot Prodigy! CompuServe, AOL, and such were priced at from $5 per month for limited use to $20 per month for unlimited use. That is just ridiculous.

    Gee, that’s quite the reaction to a writer not knowing the cost of those services. And once again, it’s unclear what is meant by SJW. Perhaps it’s similar to the Republican notion that the poverty rate in America is close to zero, since nearly everybody has a refrigerator and a television.

  5. I used to work for France Telecom, and my last boss there was in fact the former project manager for the phone directory app, which was what the Minitel was introduced for in the first place. At one point it was the largest database app in the world. Oracle had bid for the contract and even given FT the source code for its database, but it was not fast enough and the FT engineers built a custom in-memory database (using 80s technology) to do it.

    They later opened it up to third-party services (using the equivalent of 1-900 toll numbers, except in France toll numbers were implemented on the infrastructure of Minitel) and those generated about $1B per year in revenue. Towards the end, most of it was B2B apps, e.g. insurance brokers connecting to the insurer’s mainframe via a their Minitel.

    In 1996, when I was the architect for their fledgling ISP division, we had to fight incessant turf battles with the Minitel division, made tougher by the fact they generated so much more revenue than we did. We did succeed in pushing FT management to adopt web standards instead of quasi-proprietary not-invented-here stuff the Minitel guys wanted to foist on us like the VEMMI protocol (think tn3270 or X11). After 1998 or so, even the die-hards were forced to face reality. It took another decade or so for the service to be wound down, most likely because the switch equipment was no longer maintainable.

    The official rationale for the Minitel was to get rid of paper phone books (although the yellow pages kept going afterwards, mostly because they are an advertising medium) but the real reason was industrial policy. France had just finished replacing its abysmal telephone network (*) with brand new Alcatel digital switches throughout the 70s, and the Telecoms Directorate-General (then an arm of the government) had to find a new use for those electronics factories.

    (*) It used to be so bad that in Fernand Raynaud’s famous comedy “le 22 à Asnières” has the poor sap trying to call a nearby number and in the end the only way he manages to connect is via a New York operator.

  6. Double Wow! I recall my progression of modems from 8 kbit/sec to 56 kbit/sec with all data included into my local land phone plan. All these free month trial Cds from junk mail and $5/month for 40 hours plans … French government really knows how to subsidize long vacations! Too bad that they did not have enough money for free air-conditioners. But good that French did not start a war over it. Nazis promised free volkswagen to every right person but instead had to start world war 2 to burn bad accounting books.

  7. The media laid the universal broadband nonsense on thick in that story, but it still conceded:

    “Minitel was decommissioned in 2012 after 30 years of distinguished service. The terminals still functioned, but they could not handle advances in graphics technology, their modems were outdated, and the French had long since moved on to the internet.”

    It might be a better example of how any government broadband program is doomed.

  9. Nazis promised free volkswagen to every right person .

    Actually they didn’t. The way it was supposed to work is that you got an empty booklet with spots for stamps and every week you were supposed to buy a stamp (which cost maybe 1/10th of an average worker’s salary) and when you had saved up enough stamps (after about 4 years) you would turn it in for your KdF-wagen (not Volkswagen though it was the same car). If you do the math, it’s not much different than what people spend on car payments today , the difference being that in modern America they give you the car BEFORE you have paid for it. (The other difference being that by modern standards, the KdF-wagen was a very basic car . But considerably better than what the average German worker could afford otherwise.)

    But the war started before anyone had a chance to fill up their book. After the war there was a lawsuit that dragged on into the ’60s and finally the VW company agreed to give those who had bought KdF stamps some credit toward the purchase of a VW.

  11. Author praises the socialist (government owned) Minitel as being superior to walled gardens such as AOL. The private providers either evolved with the technology or went out of business, but the French government kept Minitel on line long after it was a technological dinosaur. It’s very typical of government that they will build something new and cutting edge but then keep it unchanged for decades.

  12. Phil is spot on. There are a number of good videos on Youtube and the video’s provided by @Jackie of #10 is a prof of history repeating itself. You see computer addicts, worries about fake users, real-time chat, online shopping, etc. So yes, everything-old-is-new-again and every-time I tell my young co-workers virtually all of today’s technology existed back in 1960’s and 70’s, they look at me as if I’m out-of-this-world.

    This video [1] is a good intro to Minitel and it gives examples of some of today’s technology that existed back during the Minitel days. It even shows how today’s Apple Store online model of today existed back during the Minitel days. Here is another video [2] (a program I used to watch).

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFwW8_kmY20
    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUx7dP2S7h4

  13. George A
    Sure. But it is all about scalability and ease of use. Digital economy did not exist back in 60th and really took off in mid-90th.

Comments are closed.