Date : Sat, 23 Jul 2011 00:26:25 +0200
From : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: Minitel in France
On 21/07/2011 21:49, F. Haroon wrote:
> From what I can understand from the French on this page
[...]
> France is about lose it's highly successful and much loved
> counterpart to our Prestel (d. 1991), Minitel, after 30 years of
> service. I cannot make out why though... if anyone knows an
> English translation version of this story, not available on that
> site :-(, then it'd shed more light on this.
Okay, here's my rough translation for you...
====================================================================
After 30 years of good and loyal service, the Minitel, a French
invention that is installed in over nine million homes, will finally
disappear mid-2012, a victim of the success of the Internet.
With the rise of the 'net, the demise of the little plastic cube that
permits you to find a phone number, enroll in a university, buy
"on-line", or read messages, has been forecast time and again, but its
persistant popularity has prevented such a demise.
France Telecom, which launched Minitel in 1982, has formally agreed to
the final nine months of service. Minitel will die a natural death on
the 30th of June 2012.
They have picked that date as the official time when the X25 service
will be stopped. This is the codename of the network that provides the
Minitel functionality. FT/Orange had scheduled to unplug on 30th
September 2011.
"We have decided to postpone the switch-off to 30 June 2012 to bring
more time and comfort to services who need to migrate (to internet
services)", said a spokesman for Orange. "While the Minitel is still in
sales, usage and traffic are clearly declining. It makes for a natural
death", he adds.
The death of the Minitel will mark the end of what was touted in its
early days as a "telematics revolution", with dedicated terminals,
affordable yet solid and reliable, opening with a snap to reveal a
screen and keyboard, from which to access the videotext network.
Minitel peaked in 2002, equipping nine million homes and businesses.
However it never managed to be exported beyond the French border.
By the end of 2010, there were more than 810,000 terminals in
conventional circulation. The service was also used by 950,000 people on
a computer, using software launched in 2000 which allowed access via the
Internet. This will also disappear.
The turnover of the Minitel peaked in the late 1990s with one billion
euros in revenues, but has steadily declined since. It fell last year to
30 million gross, of which France Telecom "provides 85% to content
publishers", says the company.
In early 2009, France Telecom and PagesJaunes, who wanted to stop the
most popular service, the directory 3611 [it's an on-line phonebook],
had to go back and revise the date in the face of protests from users.
If the directory is a flagship of the Minitel service, the service only
allowed you to access a mere 1880 services at the end of 2010, which is
far from the 20,000 on offer in 1996-1997 during the heyday.
Many companies have indeed left the ship: it is no longer possible to
buy a ticket from Air France or SNCF Minitel, nor to view the results of
the baccalaureate results.
Likewise, the big banks which allowed account access has started to
desert. LCL closed its service on 30th June because of insufficient
traffic to justify operation. However they at least took the trouble to
advise regular users of this by letter.
For the final aficionados, if you don't have the spirit of a collector,
Orange requests that you simply take your Minitel to the nearest branch
shop where it will be collected and, in turn, dismantled and recycled.
====================================================================
Okay. The key differences are that Prestel was, AFAIK (Rob, you might be
able to fill in?) launched to be a money-maker. Not a lot was free, and
pages were provided on a pay-to-view basis, with an individual frame
carrying a price from 0p to 99p.
Minitel equipment, on the other hand, was originally handed out for free
- you had a choice of Minitel or a printed phonebook. Many people chose
Minitel. The on-line phonebook was free, and post offices used to have
Minitel equipment that people could use to look up phone numbers. The
search system, albeit clunky (V.23) was actually pretty damn smart. I
know there's a KFC in Nantes as when I tried back in 2004, I tried
"kentucky fried chicken" and it gave me a result which I later confirmed
with www.kfc.fr ["later" being about seven years!]
There were, many, paid services, usually one called a centralised four
digit number which would cost you so much per minute. It was common to
see adverts for such things as 3617PORN or 3615REDOUTE and such, with
the four digits being the access number, and the word being the keyword
to select the service.
I believe FT charges a flat ?1/minute, which is pricey, but then so is
keeping the old tech going. :-(
People in Brittany got both a Minitel and a phonebook. A little thank
you, for the service was designed and implemented in Brittany, and the
equipment built in, IIRC, Saint-L?.
Minitel was remarkably secure. While its display protocols are known,
the encryption system used for "sensitive" information is not well
known. I believe it to be a simple form of public key - simple by
today's standards, but as far as I know Minitel has had no big breaches
(unlike <cough> <clough> a certain person's Prestel mailbox <cough> ),
and as such the French public trusted it, moreso than the Internet. This
is also partly political with France's previous "interesting" take on
solid end-user encryption meaning that SSL/https was illegal back in the
'90s, but the government of the day was forced to cave as asking people
to go online and provide sensitive information in the clear is just
stupid and risks damaging French trade. Minitel, on the other hand, was
safe, reliable, and always there.
I have not been able to use Minitel anything like as much as I would
have wanted. Until 2009 we had no landline, and the one we have now is
VoIP which is no good for Minitel (no, not even at 1200 baud).
While Prestel had no error correction system built in, while Minitel
did. I have noticed that non-teletext style pages are sent in chunks, so
it might be ack/nack based.
The original Minitel was monochrome, and teletext-like. This was soon
expanded to support colours instead of shades of grey.
The next revision (1B) was bi-standard, where you could have
teletext-like, or 80 column monochrome - acting as a VT100.
Then came the Minitel2 which offered redefinable characters, and various
graphics functions. I've seen an advert drawn (slowly) on a Minitel2 box
where it looks like it is using primatives (line, circle, etc). I've
also seen bitmap style pictures which I hope were sent as bitmap data,
not a list of primatives! ;-)
I have a Minitel2. From what I remember (been a long time since I poked
around), it is based around an 8051 clone. I tried to get it to speak to
a modem hooked to a RiscPC, but that never got anywhere...
It looks like this:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:ClownVTXPhoto.jpg
and, IIRC, it is a monochrome screen. I think...?
Best wishes,
Rick.
--
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...