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[81]History of Technology[82]Topic[83]Type[84]Feature
Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web
A decade before the Internet went mainstream, French citizens were
interacting via Minitel, a computer network open to anyone with a telephone
[85]Julien Mailland
[86]Kevin Driscoll
20 Jun 2017
11 min read
Minitel terminal
SSPL/Getty Images
It was the late 1970s. Former French presidents Charles de Gaulle and
George Pompidou had recently died. The Arab oil embargo caused energy
prices to quadruple for a time. Marseille remained gripped by drug
lords. And France had to face the fact that its telephone network was
one of the worst in the industrialized world. Fewer than 7 million
telephone lines served 47 million French citizens, and the country’s
elite felt that the domination of U.S. firms in telephone equipment,
computers, databases, and information networks threatened their
national sovereignty. Or at least it damaged their cultural pride.
In an influential 1978 report to President Valery Giscard d’Estaing,
titled The Computerization of Society, government researchers Simon
Nora and Alain Minc argued that the solution to France’s telecom woes
lay in “telematics”—a combination of [87]telecommunications and
informatics. They outlined a plan for digitizing the telephone network,
adding a layer of interactive [88]teletext video technology, and
providing entrepreneurs with an open platform for innovation.
__________________________________________________________________
Taken with Nora and Minc’s vision, the nation’s leadership began to lay
the groundwork for France’s computerized future. In 1983, on orders
from the president, computer engineers within the Post, Telegraph &
Telephone (PTT) ministry began to roll out throughout France a
telematics system that came to be known as Minitel. It allowed ordinary
people to obtain and share information online, launching the country
into the digital age and leapfrogging the United States by more than a
decade.
The story of how Minitel came to be is a fascinating but largely
forgotten one. To the extent that it’s remembered today, Minitel is
portrayed as a closed, centralized system encumbered by government
bureaucracy that failed to change with the times. But back in 1983 it
was like nothing anyone had seen before, eventually growing to have
more than 20,000 online services before the World Wide Web even got off
the ground.
In Silicon Valley today, those who lived through the Minitel era tend
to view it as the epitome of how not to build and operate an online
system: They believe that letting the government design and run it just
invited disaster. In truth, Minitel was never fully controlled by the
state. It was a hybrid system—a public platform for private innovation.
And it worked pretty well.
To initiate a connection, a user manually dialed a local gateway using
a telephone handset. The call, carried over the public switched
telephone network, was answered by software running on the
switch—typically a CIT-Alcatel E-10—which played an audible carrier
signal back over the line. Hearing this tone, the user would place the
handset back on its cradle and begin using the Minitel terminal, which
would be carrying out a special handshake protocol with the switch.
Rail travelers bought tickets from 3615 SNCF, news junkies gathered at
3615 LEMONDE, and dudes (
The gateways, known aspoints d’accès videotex, or PAVIs, provided an
interface to a directory of known Minitel services, identified by short
mnemonic codes. For example, rail travelers bought tickets from 3615
SNCF (SNCF being an acronym for Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer,
the French railroad), news junkies gathered at 3615 LEMONDE (Le Monde
being a leading Parisian newspaper), and dudes (mecs in French) browsed
the personal ads at 3615 MEC. Like URLs today, these codes were printed
in magazines, shown in television commercials, and plastered on the
sides of buses.
Once the user typed in the desired destination, the switch created a
virtual circuit over a public data network known as [89]Transpac, and
data could begin to flow from the client’s terminal to the host server
and back. These virtual circuits used the X.25 network protocol, the
paradigmatic packet-switching technique developed largely by
researchers at the French Centre Commun d’Études de Télévision et
Télécommunications.
At the start, though, Minitel advocates faced a chicken-and-egg
problem. Why would anyone adopt the system unless there were
interesting things to do with it? And yet how could they convince
entrepreneurs to create services unless the platform already had users?
Somehow, Minitel needed to attract both users and service providers at
the same time.
To kick-start the process, the PTT ordered millions of Minitel
terminals (built by French manufacturers such as Telic-Alcatel and
Matra) and made them available at no cost to everyone in the country
who had a telephone line. Anyone curious about the new system being
promoted on TV could simply go to the post office and return home with
a shiny new Minitel box.
Minitel designers made the system fully plug and play: All you had to
do was plug the terminal into the wall, dial the local gateway, et
voilà, you were transported into cyberspace. Meanwhile, would-be
cybernauts in the United States who wanted to get online had to buy
expensive computer equipment, install confusing software, pay hefty
long-distance phone bills, and prepay a separate subscription to each
service provider they wanted to use.
The first service available on Minitel was an electronic phone book, or
annuaire électronique. Equipped with a natural-language interface for
search, this oft-used resource was an easy way to explore Minitel for
free. Later, the government began to require that people use Minitel
for certain administrative tasks such as university registration. These
modest public services stimulated adoption of Minitel on France’s
fast-expanding telephone network. Whether from home, work, or at a
public terminal on the street, by the end of the 1980s, every adult
living in France had access to the network.
A black and white photo of a man holding a phone and looking at a small
monitor on a shelf. Sans y Penser: During the 1980s, Minitel terminals
proliferated throughout France, where they became just another part of
ordinary life. People used them regularly without thinking much about
it, in their homes, at work, or in various public places.Owen
Franken/Corbis/Getty Images
Prompted by the growth of Minitel’s user population, entrepreneurs
jumped at the opportunity to create new services. These startups
benefited from a novel payment system built into the Minitel platform
that lowered the barrier to entry. Named after the newsstands that line
the boulevards of Paris, the PTT’s Kiosk system handled the accounting,
collecting money from users at one end, cutting checks for service
providers at the other, and keeping a tidy slice for itself. Small
service providers could thus design lean information systems that
generated profit without having also to manage customer relationships,
take credit cards, or chase down past-due bills. Indeed, the app-store
model employed by [90]Apple, [91]Steam, and others now is little more
than a privatized version of the Minitel Kiosk.
Providers were allowed to use any hardware or software they liked so
long as its output conformed to guidelines published by the phone
company. As demand for Minitel grew, the market for server hardware
became fiercely competitive. Providers built their systems on any
machine capable of running a multiuser operating system, from
proprietary mainframes and Unix-friendly minicomputers to Commodore
Amigas and IBM PCs.
Beyond the iconic terminal equipment, France hoped to jump-start
domestic production of server hardware as well. This part of the
telematics project did not go as planned: Hacker-entrepreneurs demanded
more Unix support, but French manufacturers such as [92]Groupe Bull
failed to provide it. As a result, Minitel services were often hosted
on machines built by U.S. corporations such as [93]AT&T,
[94]Hewlett-Packard, and [95]Texas Instruments, and so, ironically,
Minitel broadened rather than curtailed the U.S. presence in French
telecom.
Those administering the system encouraged service providers by offering
high-quality documentation for free. Over the course of two decades,
France Telecom published dozens of brochures on user-interface
standards, terminals, PAVIs, protocols, and so on. A quarterly
newsletter, La Lettre de Télétel, informed industry participants of the
latest technical improvements and business experiments.
f3 Elle Avait Son Sourire: Eventually some Minitel terminals were
outfitted with credit card readers, making it possible for people to
pay bills electronically and providing a great convenience.Photo:
Michel Gaillard/REA/Redux
French companies extended the Minitel platform with new kinds of
terminals and peripherals. Terminals with built-in memory functions,
chip-card readers, and high-resolution color displays began appearing
on the market. Most Minitel terminals featured a serial port and
multiple display modes, enabling users to connect the terminal to a
printer, credit card reader, or PC. For small business owners, this
flexibility transformed the Minitel terminal into a low-cost
point-of-sale system. And long before the Internet of Things, Minitel
was incorporated into a variety of home-automation schemes, allowing
remote control of heaters, VHS recorders, security alarms, and
sprinklers.
With this open platform for innovation, telematics electrified the
country, making France of the 1980s a place of tremendous digital
experimentation and excitement. And, unlike ventures during the
speculative boom and bust of the dot-com years in Silicon Valley, the
Kiosk system provided a reliable business model for Minitel
entrepreneurs, enriching a relatively large number of service providers
in the process. The technical infrastructure of the Minitel ecosystem
enabled the French to benefit from a wealth of online services at a
time when the online landscape in the United States was limited to
local [96]BBSs and fledging walled gardens like [97]CompuServe.
Although it wasn’t the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology
during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service
providers to operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only
the network, whereas in most other countries, a single organization had
centralized control of both the network and servers for the videotex
system.
In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the [98]Prestel
videotex system was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General
Post Office. Germany’s [99]BTX system was similarly arranged. In the
United States, all of the content from [100]The Source, an early
private provider of online information, was served up from a single
computer center in McLean, Va. Even 101 Online, a Minitel spin-off that
operated briefly in the San Francisco Bay Area, stored its data in an
office on California Street. That degree of centralization ultimately
hindered innovation by excluding the kinds of garage and college-dorm
startups that made the Internet what it is today.
Minitel gave service providers considerable freedom over their systems,
a feature that would become a staple of the Internet. Minitel’s
administrators also abided by an early form of net neutrality. The
network did not favor one service over any other or otherwise
discriminate. Occasionally, a service would be barred for breaking the
law (by serving as a marketplace for prostitution, for example), but
any such exclusion was subject to due process, and the system’s
administration could be sued if it acted arbitrarily. These guarantees
of fairness stood in stark contrast to the situation in the United
States, where private network operators could exclude content on a whim
to serve their business interests.
Of course, the advantages of the Minitel design came at a cost. The
network used a nonstandard implementation of the X.25 protocol that
prevented privately run servers from connecting directly to one
another. Instead, all connections were routed through the public data
network, effectively centralizing communications between hosts. This
constraint was necessary for implementing the Kiosk system, but it also
required each host to be individually approved by the state.
Routing all traffic through the central network also enabled the state
to attempt to implement a censorship policy on Minitel. Because of
intense lobbying by existing print industries, only incumbent
publishers got access to the Kiosk. In short order, however, would-be
service providers began to route around this bureaucratic obstacle by
printing fake newspapers, known collectively as the “ghost press,”
which qualified them for recognition by the state. Others bought and
sold their access on a secondary market. In most cases, the Minitel
administration was happy to connect these entrepreneurial mavericks,
capturing one-third of their revenue in the process.
Minitel was thus hardly the rigid, static system imagined by many
Internet advocates of the 1990s. The hybrid architecture—bridging
public and private, open and closed—provided a rich platform for
innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when online services
elsewhere in the world were floundering.
For a generation of French citizens, Minitel wasn’t about hardware,
switches, or software. It was about the people they chatted with, the
services they used, the games they played, and the advertisements for
these services they saw in newspapers and on billboards. Many of the
services that we associate with the Web had predecessors in Minitel.
Before there was Peapod, there was 3615 TMK (Tele-Market), a service
that enabled Parisians to order groceries for same-day delivery. Before
there was Cortana or Siri, there were Claire and Sophie, services that
provided personalized information using natural-language interfaces.
Before there was Ticketmaster, there was Billetel. And before there was
telebanking, there was Minitel banking.
The services that most stand out in the popular memory of Minitel,
though, were undoubtedly the messageries roses. These “pink chat rooms”
were sites of flirtatious exploration that ranged from rather
conventional online dating to discussions that were downright
lascivious and crude. Pink Minitel services were not only popular, they
were also most lucrative. The profitability of these adult-oriented
services led to an advertising war among pink providers in print media,
on television, and over billboards, so the phenomenon was hard to
escape, even if you never used Minitel. Telematics advocates were by
turns thrilled by this enthusiastic embrace of the new technology and
concerned by its rosy hue. One PTT minister lamented, “[I do] not want
telematics to have its image tarnished by the exclusive use of
fornicatory fellowship!”
photo of sign board for 3615 ULLA La Vie en Rose: 3615 ULLA was one of
Minitel’s many sex chat rooms—“messageries roses.”Sagaphoto/Alamy
The emergence of pink Minitel was the result of both low- and high-tech
innovation. On the low end were the animatrices, a new type of
information worker whose job was, in the words of one popular song of
the period, to “digitally undress” users. Animatrices were often young
men posing as women. Their task was to keep unsuspecting customers
online for as long as possible. While many animatrices were paid,
others were self-described Minitel addicts who bartered their services
for free connection time.
The entrepreneurs behind these pink chat rooms, some of whom would
later dominate France’s telematics industry, also developed more
sophisticated tools to maximize their revenue. PCs rigged up with
software allowed animatrices to handle multiple conversations at once.
Another practice—frowned on by many in the community but nonetheless
widespread—was to use bots to engage in online solicitation. Minitel
tycoon [101]Xavier Niel deployed such automated animatrices, inviting
users to “come hang out with me in another chat room.”
The runaway popularity of adult-oriented services depended on certain
privacy protections built into the network itself. Starting at the
local gateway, all Minitel connections were anonymized. No usernames or
credit card numbers were required, so the chat-room providers never
knew the real identities of their customers, nor did they need that
information to make money. Because billing was handled by the PTT,
service providers received one lump sum per billing cycle, rather than
dealing with thousands of individual accounts. This payment system,
which effortlessly charged the user, is also the reason why Minitel was
relatively free of advertising.
Privacy and anonymity extended to the user side as well. Consumers’
telephone bills did not reveal which sites they had visited. Instead,
the telephone company aggregated all activity for the billing period
into a single charge. So it was easy for an employee assigned
work-related Minitel tasks to sneak into a chat room, pink or
otherwise. To some, the messagerie became the new water cooler (to the
dismay of many business owners).
Minitel enthusiasts cherished the network’s privacy and anonymity. In
late 1984, Minitel engineers added a feature to the terminal that saved
the last page visited and made it easier for the user to pick up an
interrupted session—as a browser cookie does today. The public outcry
was swift and brutal. Editorials in newspapers, which (rightly) saw
Minitel as a competitor, warned that Big Brother had arrived. Some
3,000 terminals were returned in protest. The PTT soon dropped this
feature.
Minitel use peaked in 1993, when users logged more than 90 million
hours at their terminals enjoying various Kiosk services. In the years
to follow, usage declined as home computing and dial-up Internet access
spread. Dedicated users could continue to access Minitel using
terminal-emulation software, but many others simply moved on. The
easy-to-use Minitel terminal and its straightforward videotex
interface, once so groundbreaking but now proving inflexible, stymied
further development.
photo of junked terminals Salle d’attente: Junked terminals await
disassembly for recycling.Bruno Martin/Reuters/Alamy
Although hundreds of thousands of users continued to access the system
each month through the 1990s and beyond, Minitel no longer seemed a
shining symbol of France’s telematics future. Rather, it was an
unremarkable part of everyday life, no more dazzling than the radio or
telephone. In 2012, after nearly 30 years of continuous operation, the
PAVIs were shut down, and the Minitel era came to a close.
But it would be wrong to view Minitel as a failure. Indeed, it offers
an intriguing model for fostering innovation without sacrificing the
public’s interests in fairness and privacy. The millions of curious
minitélistes and risk-taking entrepreneurs who flocked to the platform
during the 1980s were among the first people to confront the problems
of trust, intimacy, privacy, and civility that characterize life online
today. That grand telematics experiment is over, but it still has
lessons to teach the many engineers and computer scientists struggling
to make the Web a better place.
This article appears in the July 2017 print issue as “The French
Connection Machine.”
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essagerie rose[114]videotex
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