So....I guess bragging rights go to France not Al Gore and his invention of the internet.......
Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web
By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris 27 June 2012
Article Link
France is switching off its groundbreaking Minitel service which brought online banking, travel reservations, and porn to millions of users in the 1980s. But then came the worldwide web. Minitel has been slowly dying and the plug will be pulled on Saturday.
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.
Today bakers from Timbuktu to Tallahassee are not just consulting their bank statements online, but doing just about everything else as well.
And so on Saturday, exactly 30 years after it was launched, the Minitel is bowing out. After that, the little beige box will answer no more.
It was born in the white heat of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's technological great leap forward of the late 1970s.
An expert report then concluded that with proper investment the nation's telephone network could be complemented by a visual information system, accessed through screen-keyboard terminals.
"As well as being a technological project, it was political," says Karin Lefevre of France Telecom. "The aim was to computerise French society and ensure France's technological independence."
Minitel 1 About 600,000 are estimated to remain in use
Rolled out experimentally in Brittany, Minitel went national in 1982, offering the telephone directory and not much else.
Gradually the offer increased to offer a vast array of services - banking, stock prices, weather reports, travel reservations, exam results, university applications, as well as access points to various bits of the state administration.
All users had to do was dial up a number on the keyboard, then follow instructions that juddered out in black and white across the screen.
t may have been the ultimate in computer clunk, but it worked.
"Of course it looks terribly old-fashioned by today's standards," says Lefevre. "But it was simple to use. You pressed a button and it did something. Just like on a tablet today."
Apart from ease of use, two other factors ensured Minitel's success. First was that it was distributed free of charge by the then state-owned France Telecom (or its predecessor the PTT).
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Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web
By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris 27 June 2012
Article Link
France is switching off its groundbreaking Minitel service which brought online banking, travel reservations, and porn to millions of users in the 1980s. But then came the worldwide web. Minitel has been slowly dying and the plug will be pulled on Saturday.
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.
Today bakers from Timbuktu to Tallahassee are not just consulting their bank statements online, but doing just about everything else as well.
And so on Saturday, exactly 30 years after it was launched, the Minitel is bowing out. After that, the little beige box will answer no more.
It was born in the white heat of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's technological great leap forward of the late 1970s.
An expert report then concluded that with proper investment the nation's telephone network could be complemented by a visual information system, accessed through screen-keyboard terminals.
"As well as being a technological project, it was political," says Karin Lefevre of France Telecom. "The aim was to computerise French society and ensure France's technological independence."
Minitel 1 About 600,000 are estimated to remain in use
Rolled out experimentally in Brittany, Minitel went national in 1982, offering the telephone directory and not much else.
Gradually the offer increased to offer a vast array of services - banking, stock prices, weather reports, travel reservations, exam results, university applications, as well as access points to various bits of the state administration.
All users had to do was dial up a number on the keyboard, then follow instructions that juddered out in black and white across the screen.
t may have been the ultimate in computer clunk, but it worked.
"Of course it looks terribly old-fashioned by today's standards," says Lefevre. "But it was simple to use. You pressed a button and it did something. Just like on a tablet today."
Apart from ease of use, two other factors ensured Minitel's success. First was that it was distributed free of charge by the then state-owned France Telecom (or its predecessor the PTT).
More on link
