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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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  [108]cyberspace[109]internet[110]type:feature[111]PTT[112]Minitel[113]m
  essagerie rose[114]videotex

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 80. https://spectrum.ieee.org/core/saml/main/login?next_url=https://spectrum.ieee.org/core/integrations/ieee/changes
 81. https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/tech-history/
 82. https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/
 83. https://spectrum.ieee.org/type/
 84. https://spectrum.ieee.org/type/feature/
 85. https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/julien-mailland
 86. https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/kevin-driscoll
 87. https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/telecommunications/
 88. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/time-teletext-pre-internet-digital-media?utm_source=mbtwitter
 89. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5621965/?reload=true
 90. https://www.apple.com/
 91. http://store.steampowered.com/
 92. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Bull
 93. https://www.att.com/
 94. http://www.hp.com/country/us/en/welcome.html
 95. http://www.ti.com/
 96. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system
 97. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
 98. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
 99. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext
100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)
101. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/global/xavier-niel-billionaire-who-breaks-the-mold.html
102. https://spectrum.ieee.org/from-trash-to-treasure-how-to-resurrect-a-minitel-terminal
103. https://spectrum.ieee.org/log-on-like-its-1985-a-fragment-of-minitel-returns
104. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computer-networking
105. https://minitel.us/
106. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/28/minitel-france-says-farewell
107. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/minitel
108. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/cyberspace
109. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/internet
110. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/type-feature
111. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/ptt
112. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/minitel
113. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/messagerie-rose
114. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/videotex
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