Minitel, France's private internet, to be shut down

[Cain]

I bet you didn't know France had it's own special interwebs, huh?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18610692

Many years ago, long before the birth of the web, there was a time when France was the happening-est place in the digital universe.

What the TGV was to train travel, the Pompidou Centre to art, and the Ariane project to rocketry, in the early 1980s the Minitel was to the world of telecommunications.

Thanks to this wondrous beige monitor attached to the telephone, while the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank manager or queueing for tickets at the station, the French were already shopping and travelling "online".

Other countries looked on in awe and admiration, and the French were proud.

As President Jacques Chirac boasted: "Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?"

Chirac was speaking in 1997, exactly half way through the life-cycle of France's greatest telecoms innovation.

At the time, he could be forgiven thinking it would last forever. This was the high point, with nine million Minitel sets installed in households around the country, an estimated 25 million users, and 26,000 services on offer.

But of course, the story was already written. The internet was moving in

On the one hand, the sad march of universal progress blah blah blah.

On the other hand, it does show that an alternative to the internet can exist....albeit with state backing.  That may be an important thing to remember, in 20 years time when we can no longer access "unapproved" internet sites, assuming FaceGoogle doesn't buy the internet and scrub all mentions of Minitel from existence before then.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Whoa... Never even heard of this.

[Bruno]

I remember seeing something on this years ago.

For some reason, I was thinking the screens were red.

[P3nT4gR4m]

The really fun thing about minitel (yeah I lived in france for a couple of months back in the 90's) was that it really, totally was just like the real internet - 99% of minitel sites were porn. Well, okay they didn't actually have pictures on the screen back then, it was all text but you could text chat the girls from the numerous billboard ads and they'd type dirty to ya.

It seems like pretty much any new technology will first be weaponised then pornomated then used to sell viagra