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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 28 2012 @ 03:55 PM EDT |
That's pretty unfair. Minitel was way ahead of anything
else available at that time.
It was a small terminal that attaches to a standard phone
line - cheap, easy, and reliable.
At that time, practically nobody in France (outside the
military and research) had computers. Computers existed
mostly in the US and in Japan, with Germany not too far
behind thanks to close ties to US industry (plus the fact
that many Germans understand English well enough to use a
Windows machine in English - this created a market big
enough that German translations were soon available, but
even today not everybody in Germany uses them). (I don't
know much about Asia; maybe Korean businesses were using
computers too?)
Anyway, in France you could do things like check the train
schedule (that's something useful and important in France,
unlike the US) and actually buy tickets, using Minitel. You
could also get porn, which is always the sign of a
successful and lucrative technology. And when I say "you
could" I don't mean a few rich people or a few cutting-edge
businesses, I mean this was in EVERY HOME. This was at
least a decade before, say, the advent of the Mosaic
browser; in other words before most Americans had ever heard
of the WWW.
It was centralised, yes. It almost had to be. You can't
build such a system without a network, and TDF ran the
network. The concept of an "Internet" was still rather
new, so the idea of open protocols was basically unproven.
But more largely, centralization has some social advantages.
Even though France still has fewer computers per capita than
the US, guess which country has faster internet access in
the home? Guess which country has better mobile phone
service, with more advanced mobile phones?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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