France Ending Minitel Service 137
New submitter pays-vert writes "On Saturday, France will turn off the Minitel service. A forerunner of the world wide web, Minitel provided news, online banking and, yes, porn via a chic plug'n'play terminal. The service remained massively popular for a while even after the rise of the Internet, but ultimately has lost out to technological innovation. 'About 400,000 of the machines are still in use across the country, but perhaps most affected will be Brittany, where the devices were developed, and where many farmers still depend on them. ... Internet service spread much more slowly in France than it did elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, largely because of the popularity of the Minitel, historians say. Only around the turn of the century did the Internet come to much of this soggy western region, an expanse of green that bulges out into the Atlantic Ocean. The Minitel was hugely useful to farmers. Realizing that the devices could save time and money, local agricultural organizations developed programs for farmers to, say, track pork prices, inform the authorities of animal births and deaths, or consult the results of chemical tests on milk.'"
Re:forerunner to web, but not internet (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that's what the summary said: "... A forerunner of the world wide web, Minitel ..."
Minitel lasted because it was useful (Score:5, Informative)
Until some time around 1997, exploring simple travel plans, booking and paying for them was a fucking nightmare for the rest of the world; they'd been doing it for more than a decade already in France, via a system which was very fast (remember those shitty 33.6K & X2 modems?) and very convenient. Standardised. Without pop-ups.
Germany's Post monopoly prevented this and instead buit the BTX system, designed to make profits, primarily for the Post (fmr. Telekom parent), and because phone costs were so high. getting on-line was a terribly expensive proposition in Germany until the Post monopoly was broken up.
Re:Going down kicking and screaming (Score:5, Informative)
What makes you think that the french government keeped subsidizing it, it was a cash cow for the government when france telecom was still a mostly "public" company, the high revenue of 3615 (mostly "hot stuff") was bringing billions to the government.
I'm sure that Bercy (the french Finance Ministery) are still having wet dreams about milking as much from the internet..
They are closing it because only the "cheapest" service are still around.
The way it worked is that you could (as a service provider) choose :
Service Operators pays all (only rare very specialized services worked that way) (nbr 3613)
Service Operators pays nothing, the user pay little (most "public services", and most of what survives till the end of this week) (nbr 3614)
Service Operators get a little, the user pays more (nbr 3615)
Service Operators get a lot, the user pays a lot (nbr 3617)
Most services where 3615, but now most services ar 3613, and with the number of terminals going from 20 Millions*Lots of hours to 400 K * few hours it probably only now starts to cost more maintaining the service than it generates revenues.
We had it (briefly) here in the US. (Score:2, Informative)
US Videotel, based in Texas, tried it out in Houston and DFW. I worked for them for a while and it was actually pretty useful to get people who couldn't afford a computer "online". It was just a dumb b/w terminal with ANSI graphics and text services, but for many of us it was pretty nifty. The main competition at the time were Delphi and CompuServe which required a (>$100's) computer. The Mini-tel could be had for a nominal monthly fee.
Re:3515 ULLA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The dead past (Score:2, Informative)
You're right. The Internet was for rich people who could afford to wait 30 seconds for a picture to download. The Minitel was for everyone else (almost as you still had to pay the connection) but you didn't need to buy a computer (the Minitel was almost given for free).
Breton farmers do NOT depend on Minitel. Grrrr. (Score:5, Informative)
OP: "perhaps most affected will be Brittany, where the devices were developed, and where many farmers still depend on them."
Sorry, but that is what we Europeans call "bollocks". I was in Brittany two weeks ago, in a campsite in the middle of nowhere, and it was saturated in 3G/HSDPA mobile broadband. I drove all round the place, 3G everywhere. Decent stuff, too, was browsing BBC News at snappy speeds, even video worked fine.
Campsite I stayed in had Wifi on about a 4 meg connection, probably ADSL, middle of nowhere. Restaurants and cafes in villages and market towns, ditto. The "Domain de Kerlan" campsite I used last year even had wi-fi to *every* *single* *plot*. So stop this "farmers still depend on dumb terminals with 1.2 kilobit modems" bullshit.
France is not very big, only twice the size of the UK. It's not like the USA where there are thousands of miles of empty rural plains. It was dead easy to wire up the whole country for ADSL. That happened a decade ago. The furthest you'll ever get from a city of at least 50,000 people is about twenty-five miles, and I can't think of *any* part of France that is more than five miles from a village of at least 2,000 people.
What's more, French farmers are usually part of a local co-operative who bulk-buy engineering and technology gear at discounted rates (for example, they tend to club together to buy tractors or combine harvesters). I sincerely doubt there is any large farm that wants ADSL, or at least ISDN, that can't get it; French farmers are fscking *minted*.
"Many farmers still depend on Minitel". My arse.
Me! Me! I was there! (Score:4, Informative)
How many people on Slashdot were around during Minitel's heyday? Perhaps half of us? How many people on Slashdot are hearing about Minitel for the first time in this article?
I was very much around, and followed Minitel's development with interest. I've used Minitel on visits to France. It filled a need. It worked.
Lots of people at the time thought teletext was the way to go. In a sense it was, in the days when 1200 baud was considered a fast modem. Remember Prestel [wikipedia.org] (U.K.)? Remember all the hype about Telidon [wikipedia.org] (Canada)? And how little we have to show for it?
At one time all the ads in French magazines and stuff quoted Minitel codes, almost invariably 3615. Now they all have URLs.
...laura
Re:The one thing that Minitel had (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite the same. The minitel was.. wait for it... network neutral. Any provider (not just your ISP) could use it to deliver and bill for services. Plus billing was handled by the network operator (France Telecom at the time) which saved having to setup up credit-card/paypal/account billing, though you could still do that and go for free connection+login. It allowed micropayments (well, very low time rate), which are still an issue on the Web.
Re:The dead past (Score:5, Informative)
No, web usage was slower to pick up in France because a lot of the services that the Internet offered were already on Minitel, and, at least in the early betters, much better on Minitel. Want to find movie or theater times? Minitel had it, Internet didn't. Wanted to have some hot times with some 18-year old who really was a 45 year old man out in the middle of nowhere? Minitel had it, Internet didn't. Wanted to play games that were actually better than what Farmville offers now? Minitel had it.
The Internet had a hard time in France because the existing system was actually better. Starting mid- to late-nineties, all of that changed, of course. But to argue that government interference prevented the better technology from taking off is ass-backwards: government interference created the better technology. Minitel only was overtaken once the network effect, technological advances and yes, the free market, provided better alternatives.
RIP Minitel, it was awesome. And it's games were still beyond a lot of the cruft that passes as games on Facebook.