Odd 80s vibe …
This was Prestel, an early 80s videotext service in the U.K. which was somewhat similar in concept to the French Minitel platform but not quite. It never really took off, but it was an interesting bit of pre Internet technology. It was a lot more limited than Minitel, which actually let providers host their own services on their own servers, ands was a bit more like online teletext.
However, the GPO advertising campaigns seemed to really get the tone a bit weird - somewhere between HAL-9000 and The Ring. Rather than a friendly, cute household appliance like Minitel was presented, they managed to give this a really creepy vibe.
Minitel in France was much more successful and survived for a long time. Here’s a very good review of an old Minitel terminal connecting to a demo service (in English):
Attached below: image of late 1980s Irish Minitel. Same system - just with a QWERTY keyboard and an RJ11 phone jack and Irish power plug.
The service here never really survived beyond the earliest days of the Web and was very quickly surpassed by the internet. However, it had our earliest home banking, online shopping, airline, cinema, and train booking etc etc.
A service called Gulliver, used to centrally book B&Bs and small hotels clung on until the Minitel system was closed down. I don’t think it ever achieved much of a market, but it had some useful niches.
It was purely commercial here (a joint venture between two telcos and two banks) and incumbent phone company at the time, now known as Eir, was a 25% shareholder but didn’t really have much interest in driving it. Other online services were already available, the internet was very much on the immediate horizon and being an English speaking market, there were very few synergies with French services, but it was an interesting bit of kit and a step along the road towards the Web.
A lot of the business models for e-commerce sites were already happening on the French platform in the 80s, and at a scale because France Telecom gave the terminals away for free as part of your standard landline connection. So there were millions of active users in France at its peak and a whole ecosystem of servers and service providers (including plenty of X rated stuff) grew up around it. It was an interesting sandbox that preempted a lot of Web business models. It worked as an open exchange, allowing service providers to host their own Minitel sites and services across a very standardised platform - so you had a lot of innovative development of services for it, but it was still more like the Ma Bell concept of the phone company in charge.
Later versions supported GIF or JPEG images, better resolution and could even read chip credit cards (introduced in France in the 80s). So you could, at least on some terminals, complete secure transactions at home. Quite sophisticated for it's time and the terminals were very cute for that era. They are reminiscent of early Mac in shape, but a lot smaller, essentially dumb terminals and predate the Mac so I don't think one inspired the other.
Minitel essentially ran as an application on packet switching systems. Transpac in France, or Eirpac here. They had their own software platforms and some of the routing was done using special versions of digital telephone switches running custom software. So it was very much a creature of the 80s telephone network.
There were numerous Videotext services in Europe and North America, most of them flopped. Minitel in France seems to have the only one that ever achieved scale and a genuine existence of service providers.
It’s still cool though to look back on some of these very early attempts at mass market online services.[this post was last edited: 4/10/2022-07:43]
This was Prestel, an early 80s videotext service in the U.K. which was somewhat similar in concept to the French Minitel platform but not quite. It never really took off, but it was an interesting bit of pre Internet technology. It was a lot more limited than Minitel, which actually let providers host their own services on their own servers, ands was a bit more like online teletext.
However, the GPO advertising campaigns seemed to really get the tone a bit weird - somewhere between HAL-9000 and The Ring. Rather than a friendly, cute household appliance like Minitel was presented, they managed to give this a really creepy vibe.
Minitel in France was much more successful and survived for a long time. Here’s a very good review of an old Minitel terminal connecting to a demo service (in English):
Attached below: image of late 1980s Irish Minitel. Same system - just with a QWERTY keyboard and an RJ11 phone jack and Irish power plug.
The service here never really survived beyond the earliest days of the Web and was very quickly surpassed by the internet. However, it had our earliest home banking, online shopping, airline, cinema, and train booking etc etc.
A service called Gulliver, used to centrally book B&Bs and small hotels clung on until the Minitel system was closed down. I don’t think it ever achieved much of a market, but it had some useful niches.
It was purely commercial here (a joint venture between two telcos and two banks) and incumbent phone company at the time, now known as Eir, was a 25% shareholder but didn’t really have much interest in driving it. Other online services were already available, the internet was very much on the immediate horizon and being an English speaking market, there were very few synergies with French services, but it was an interesting bit of kit and a step along the road towards the Web.
A lot of the business models for e-commerce sites were already happening on the French platform in the 80s, and at a scale because France Telecom gave the terminals away for free as part of your standard landline connection. So there were millions of active users in France at its peak and a whole ecosystem of servers and service providers (including plenty of X rated stuff) grew up around it. It was an interesting sandbox that preempted a lot of Web business models. It worked as an open exchange, allowing service providers to host their own Minitel sites and services across a very standardised platform - so you had a lot of innovative development of services for it, but it was still more like the Ma Bell concept of the phone company in charge.
Later versions supported GIF or JPEG images, better resolution and could even read chip credit cards (introduced in France in the 80s). So you could, at least on some terminals, complete secure transactions at home. Quite sophisticated for it's time and the terminals were very cute for that era. They are reminiscent of early Mac in shape, but a lot smaller, essentially dumb terminals and predate the Mac so I don't think one inspired the other.
Minitel essentially ran as an application on packet switching systems. Transpac in France, or Eirpac here. They had their own software platforms and some of the routing was done using special versions of digital telephone switches running custom software. So it was very much a creature of the 80s telephone network.
There were numerous Videotext services in Europe and North America, most of them flopped. Minitel in France seems to have the only one that ever achieved scale and a genuine existence of service providers.
It’s still cool though to look back on some of these very early attempts at mass market online services.[this post was last edited: 4/10/2022-07:43]
