France To Turn Off Its Proto-Internet, After 30 Years.

[mongers]

Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web

By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris

28 June 2012 Last updated at 00:36

France is switching off its groundbreaking Minitel service which brought online banking, travel reservations, and porn to millions of users in the 1980s. But then came the worldwide web. Minitel has been dying slowly and the plug will be pulled on Saturday.

Many years ago, long before the birth of the web, there was a time when France was the happening-est place in the digital universe.

What the TGV was to train travel, the Pompidou Centre to art, and the Ariane project to rocketry, in the early 1980s the Minitel was to the world of telecommunications.

Thanks to this wondrous beige monitor attached to the telephone, while the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank manager or queueing for tickets at the station, the French were already shopping and travelling "online".

Other countries looked on in awe and admiration, and the French were proud.

As President Jacques Chirac boasted: "Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?"

Chirac was speaking in 1997, exactly half way through the life-cycle of France's greatest telecoms innovation.

At the time, he could be forgiven thinking it would last forever. This was the high point, with nine million Minitel sets installed in households around the country, an estimated 25 million users, and 26,000 services on offer.

But of course, the story was already written. The internet was moving in.
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Rest of article here:
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18610692

[Admiral Yi]

I saw a Minitel in a post office in France, and it didn't seem like it had any graphics capability at all.  Not sure how porn would work on it.

[Maximus]

ASCII

[CountDeMoney]

Can't say the French didn't get their moneys' worth out of that workhorse over the years.

[Habbaku]

As President Jacques Chirac boasted: "Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?"

No, I'm guessing that a baker in New York probably doesn't know how to use an obscure device in France. 

[CountDeMoney]

As President Jacques Chirac boasted: "Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?"

No, I'm guessing that a baker in New York probably doesn't know how to use an obscure device in France. 

See, that's why we can never have anything nice and French around here.

[Valmy]

I saw a Minitel in a post office in France, and it didn't seem like it had any graphics capability at all.  Not sure how porn would work on it.

Well it was the 1980s.  I am sort of shocked it was still around frankly.

[Syt]

Germany's similar service, Datex-P, has been running since the late 80s and is scheduled to continue into 2013 or 2018.

[Duque de Bragança]

I have not used a minitel in at least 10 years. One had to use it to enroll at university for instance.

[mongers]

I have not used a minitel in at least 10 years. One had to use it to enroll at university for instance.

As far as I remember, we had to queue up in a ill-lit corridor for a couple of hours, wasn't it call matriculation ?

[Ed Anger]

ASCII

I want to log onto a BBS now.

[garbon]

As President Jacques Chirac boasted: "Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?"

No, I'm guessing that a baker in New York probably doesn't know how to use an obscure device in France. 

See, that's why we can never have anything nice and French around here.

I think we could still have some nice French men.

[katmai]

Yet we get stuck with Zoupa

[Valmy]

Zoupa is dreamy

[CountDeMoney]

Zoupa is dreamy

Zoupa's OK, except when he gets all "Dances With Little Drummer Girl" on us.