Au Revoir, Minitel

The Kelsey Group blog notes the imminent demise of Minitel, the French online information service that was sort of Le World Wide Web before there was a World Wide Web. Minitel flourished in France in the 1980s, though the technology goes back even farther than that. It was intended as an electronic replacement for the White Pages, but soon grew into a more general, videotex-based information service, including retail sales, ticketing, message boards and, yes porn. 

The French–who were given Minitel terminals for free by the state phone company–loved the service, and it eventually was used by about 45 percent of the nation's population. The subsidized distribution really helped–Minitel never really caught on anywhere besides France, making it the Jerry Lewis or Mickey Rourke of technology. US West offered it briefly in the United States during the 1990s, and at one point, as I recall, New York magazine even offered it to subscribers as a primitive online service in lame competition with AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve.

The growth of the Web, of course, made Minitel obsolete, and while there has been much resistance in France to giving up the homely terminals and service, France Telecom plans to pull the plug next spring. But Minitel is an interesting footnote to today's information technology explosion–it provided early (albeit subsidized) proof that a mass market of consumers would use electronic home info services.

Comments

[edward]

Actually, Minitel goes back to the 1960's, as I remember fondly from my days on a post-college tour of Europe. It was given out initially as an alternative to the phone monopoly distributing white and yellow pages, and allowed people to look up the information for themselves. The French thought it was the knees bees, and after seeing how it worked _ and how they used it _ I came back from that trip convinced Ma Bell would soon bring it to the United States. It would have saved so much money doing away with operators. I think you are old enough to remember how much we overused 411 in the old days, even to find local numbers that were in the phone book. When computers came, and I got my first TRS-80 in 1981, I thought someone would knit these 300-baud networks together in a U.S. version of Minitel by using that phone information here, but it really didn't take off. It took another 5-year absence from the United States before I came back in 1995 to find the Internet, and you see what is happening to R.H. Donnelly (yellow page publisher) stock these days.
I have fond memories of the Minitel. At one point, the French hoped to turn it into a network that would beat the U.S. in computer technology, but they couldn't keep up with the huge leaps ahead with each release of each new Intel chip, and each new version of Microsoft.
Thanks for the blast from the past.