Very interesting to reflect on the success and failure of the minitel. It's easy to forget about the minitel project completely. I arrived in France for one year of lycee in the 1995-1996 school year with a Toshiba laptop and a whole library of pirated games, fluent in everything internet in the USA. At this time, you still mostly had to keep the game install files on a set of 3.5 inch floppy disks.
The minitel was already kind of quaint at that point in time, with the look of an old school Bulletin Board System (BBS) where the online communities first played before AOL and the exit from AOL to the World Wide Web. But I was briefly fascinated by this foreign online computer system.
Great that the Minitel had such deep trusting integration with things like the train and banks, but the graphical look was like a BASIC program, and it seemed very expensive. I spent all my time in the free areas so as not to use my host family's francs. The business model was similar to the 1-900 numbers in the US, where you would pay $1 a minute for some valuable information. As Raphael mentioned, it might be for a video game tips and tricks line, or most popularly in the US for phone sex. I wonder if there was anything sex related on the Minitel? Porn was definitely one of the boot straps for early online access in the USA, as it had been for home video players a decade before that.
As a child I also used the minitel to look for video game solutions! Without Internet at the time, this was a modern alternative to just searching for a magazine about your video game. However, my parents always monitored me because it was very expansive to use so we had to minimize the time using it. Every service was basically behind a paywall (not a "wall" really because it was added automatically to your phone bill) which was probably a advantage (the simple fact of having a service on the minitel was in itself a source of profit) but also a sign of it closed nature.
Very interesting to reflect on the success and failure of the minitel. It's easy to forget about the minitel project completely. I arrived in France for one year of lycee in the 1995-1996 school year with a Toshiba laptop and a whole library of pirated games, fluent in everything internet in the USA. At this time, you still mostly had to keep the game install files on a set of 3.5 inch floppy disks.
The minitel was already kind of quaint at that point in time, with the look of an old school Bulletin Board System (BBS) where the online communities first played before AOL and the exit from AOL to the World Wide Web. But I was briefly fascinated by this foreign online computer system.
Great that the Minitel had such deep trusting integration with things like the train and banks, but the graphical look was like a BASIC program, and it seemed very expensive. I spent all my time in the free areas so as not to use my host family's francs. The business model was similar to the 1-900 numbers in the US, where you would pay $1 a minute for some valuable information. As Raphael mentioned, it might be for a video game tips and tricks line, or most popularly in the US for phone sex. I wonder if there was anything sex related on the Minitel? Porn was definitely one of the boot straps for early online access in the USA, as it had been for home video players a decade before that.
As a child I also used the minitel to look for video game solutions! Without Internet at the time, this was a modern alternative to just searching for a magazine about your video game. However, my parents always monitored me because it was very expansive to use so we had to minimize the time using it. Every service was basically behind a paywall (not a "wall" really because it was added automatically to your phone bill) which was probably a advantage (the simple fact of having a service on the minitel was in itself a source of profit) but also a sign of it closed nature.