Minitel: France’s Alternate Internet That Survived Until 2012

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Video written by Adam Chase
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[@matt45540]

This definitely exceeds the half is interesting threshold

[@tomrogue13]

Yeah it's like 2/3 as interesting!

[@Squibolotl]

@@tomrogue13 I might even say 3/4

[@leoli306]

At least 48/97 as interesting, but probably not 36/71 as interesting

[@blueclouds315]

0.68 times as interesting

[@mightbetoad6786]

@@tomrogue13 i would say three quarters as interesting

[@CyrilleParis]

Being French, I remember very well my 70 yo grandmother ordering stuff and booking train tickets in the 1980's all by herself! And when the Internet and WWW came in the mid 1990's, France was the last developped country to be Online : the adds were like "with the Internet, you'll soon be able to book tickets from your home or send messages, etc." and most French people would think "It has been 15 years I can do this with the Minitel without having to buy an expensive computer I'll never use anyway".

[@tenalafel]

yeah, that was the issue back then... we had been doing, through the Minitel, everything that could be done through a PC with a modem, for years. The turning point was the ADSL.

[@NorseGraphic]

@@tenalafel From our lexicon (Norway): Datapak was a data communication service run by Televerket (toady: Telenor). The service used a separate packet-switched network with either a fixed connection (X.25) or a dial-up connection (X.28). Datapak came into regular operation in Norway on 1 January 1984, and was one of the first commercially available data networks in Norway. The service was later integrated into ISDN, and was widely used for, among other things, payment services and alarm systems. The Telenor product ISDNpak, which was the last available implementation of Datapak, was discontinued on 31 December 2009. A precursor to Datapak was NORPAK, developed at Televerket's research institute.

[@bigjared8946]

It seems like a brilliant at the time extension of the dumbphone more than a replacement for a modern PC which can do a whole bunch more stuff.

[@CyrilleParis]

@@bigjared8946 Yes, but in the mid-1990's, the modern PC as we know it didn't exist. There were game consoles and the Minitel that you could buy for less than a PC and which could do better. The PC and Apple computers imposed themselves first through improving already existing professionnal softwares, mainly their interfaces (screens instead of printers, windows intead of text only, the mouse, etc.), then by clever marketing. Not by a really superior tech. They were also filling a gap in the USA which were behind the rest of the world in terme of techs : filling this gap gave these companies a lot of money. It benefited also from a European invention : HTML and the World Wide Web invented at CERN. Nowadays everything have changed...

[@euanduthie2333]

You don't see it represented in media much, but France in the 1980s had this quite futuristic vibe. Minitel, TGVs, Smart Cards while the rest of the world was using mag stripes, with a backdrop of shiny modern buildings like La Défense, and the Pompidou centre, all powered by France's massive commitment to nuclear power.

[@PrincessFelicie]

Then the oil industry astroturfed the nuclear scare so we’d continue being dependent on fossil fuel, and now climate change is threatening human life as we know it. Thanks capitalism!

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Weren't the shiny modern buildings unpopular, though? I might be mistaken but I thought the general opinion of the French public was "non, c'est trop bizarre."

[@jrme4216]

we till do for example france is really ahed when it comes to ai systems and animations, and some of our tech are still the best like the rockets, tgv and nuclear technologies

[@damonroberts7372]

I know what you mean - as a child of the 80s, for a while there I thought the French might actually manage to eclipse the Anglosphere.

[@speedzero7478]

@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 C'est vrai

[@marsgal42]

I used Minitel back in the day on trips to France. It was genuinely handy. France has a long history of coming up with something neat then invoking Not Invented Here to ignore other developments.

[@user-ek6fl9k0h2e]

Agree, because french People always were contrast to other nations, therefore once France conquered half of the world, but lose it to England

[@jonjohnson2844]

They didn't come up with it, it was essentially just a copy of Prestel which came out in the UK a few years earlier. UK already had the teletext services so it never really took off in a big way because (as an information source) it was inferior to the Ceefax/Teletext service.

[@SuperSmashDolls]

Yeah, it's crazy. No other country would invent a superior standard and then NIH their way into obsolescence as the rest of the world moved on. (Quickly! All the Japanese viewers! Hide your old cellphones!)

[@Raminagrobisfr]

it was made released in 1980, and made an efficient use on the technology available at this time

[@fightwithdogma]

Another funny example : France made a game like 2nd life with a map based on Paris years before the first version of 2nd life

[@vacafuega]

To this day French people who've been talking about themselves will still end with a depreacting "3615 My Life", the French 80s equivalent of "thanks for coming to my TED talk" 😂

[@HalianTheProtogen]

That's hilarious :D

[@that_milo_guy]

I am french and I actually STILL have a Minitel on my shelf! I remember the times using it… Ah the good ol' days, snif…

[@funkymunky]

Snif 🥸🇫🇷

[@iamasteriix]

Le snifeaux*

[@that_milo_guy]

@@funkymunky ftsikou mtsikou? Di I get that right?

[@user-ek6fl9k0h2e]

@@that_milo_guy yes, he is probably russian, i don't, but know russian language

[@funkymunky]

@@that_milo_guy funky munky… 🙄💥🔫

[@christianhumer3084]

That was actually quite innovative, and the concept hasnt died out at all. You still can call a number with a phone, to get it connected, and as well, the payment goes over your Phone Bill. Theoretically, it should be possible to buy a train ticket when a company would offer it. Just not via a computer with a keyboard and a program, but with a phone via a call or a SMS.

[@jurajjamrich7905]

This is a common thing in Slovakia actually. You can buy a ticket for train or tram with sending sms to a specific number. I thought it's a common thing in other countries as well.

[@CodersGuide]

@@jurajjamrich7905 Similar concepts all over the place. For example in Dubai you can pay for (publicly owned) parking by sending an SMS.

[@EpicVideos2]

​@@jurajjamrich7905 Can confirm you can buy SBB tickets via sms in switzerland

[@____-pb1lg]

It's quite frequent to be able to pay for the bus by sms, maybe you can for the parisian metro too but i'm not sure

[@sheldonrego6121]

Yep in France you can buy bus tickets on your phone by SMS, and it's taken from your phone bill

[@liamnixon4428]

Could you please make a video on the story of Vulcan, West Virginia and how in the 70s the Soviet Union and East Germany nearly built a bridge there? It started off as the small village wanted a bridge that crossed the Tug Fork river, since they used to have a foot bridge that collapsed, and when both West Virginia, Kentucky and the federal government ignored them, the local mayor asked the Soviet embassy and East German officials to help build a bridge: the Soviets even sent a journalist there, and West Virginia immediatly promised and built a bridge so that the Soviets won't build one. It's a pretty intersting story, and it was major news at the time.

[@amanrahmani2632]

i think he already did

[@ruthkatz1998]

haha

[@hiiamelecktro4985]

They have a video suggestion link. Idk how often they use them though

[@liamnixon4428]

@@hiiamelecktro4985 Great! Can you send it, please? Maybe I'll figure it out.

[@bonaaq86]

I don't know if yt allows links (I don't have it anyway) But you can ask in their reddit with the link in the description maybe

[@jbird4478]

There were networks like this around the world back then, but only in France did it get really popular.

[@ALegitimateYoutuber]

many still exist. but the independent internets are more of things for small groups or companies. Because it provides a good source of security and helps keep things off the radar. But the exact design of them vary a lot.

[@The_Black_Hole]

That's because you didn't have to pay for the device, only for the connection

[@The360MlgNoscoper]

Like Nintendo's Satellaview

[@jbird4478]

@@ALegitimateKZbinr Yes, but national networks like the one in France with the same technology also existed in many places. They were called videotex services. In France you had Minitel, but there was also for example Viditel in the Netherlands, Viatel in Australia, Ibertex in Spain, etc. Some were even connected. You could access Minitel if you had a Viditel connection for example.

[@kv4648]

@@jbird4478 was France first though?

[@damonroberts7372]

As an Australian, I'm experiencing a crushing sense of irony after watching this video. The French government anticipated the social and economic value of the internet _in the 1970s_ and brought Minitel into being. An Australian government with no concept of the real value of the internet _in the 2010s_ brought the NBN into being, with already obsolete technology and some of the slowest broadband speeds in the developed world. Plot twist: the main flaws of Minitel and NBN are both due to pandering to newspaper barons.

[@keatonhatch6213]

I think you missed the most common denominator flaw: *”the* *govt”*

[@LRM12o8]

Same story in Germany: The social-liberal administration led by Helmut Schmidt had already made fully fledged plans for a nationwide fiber telecommunications network in 1984, but before they could realize these plans, they lost the next term's election to the conservative party under Helmut Kohl who promptly scrapped that plan and instead built "Europe's best cable TV Network" with copper cables, vastly benefitting his best friend who just so happened to be a private TV mogul and the wife of the postal minister, who coincidentally happened to run a large copper business. 🤔 The worst part of this is that the cable TV network was nearly obsoleted by satellite TV less than a decade later and Germany still to this day ranks 24/26 in terms of broadband availability, because the Kohl government wasted all that money on copper and we can't replace it now, cause they then gave that network to a singular private company, Telekom AG, who has been milking this ginormous competitive advantage for decades now with no real reason to significantly upgrade and expand the network. It's crazy how Kohl & co got away with it. They basically stole the vital internet infrastructure from the people who payed for it through their taxes and bestowed it to some private investor!

[@walangchahangyelingden8252]

@@LRM12o8 Now that's just bad

[@raptorfromthe6ix833]

@@LRM12o8 it’s a double edge sword the government invents something and allows it’s citizens ease of access wit minimum payment thus being advantageous to other countries but on the other hand it leads to monolopolization lack of innovation

[@MissElemmire]

The day before Minitel definitely stopped working, my dad unearthed our old terminal from the basement and plugged it in. It still worked like a charm ! A lot of services weren't available anymore, but we could still consult the phonebook and the weather, for exemple. It was a really fun evening, full of nostalgia for my parents and those of us children old enough to remember them using it, and full of discovery for my youngest siblings.

[@Faroeball]

The frame of text at 2:18: "Did you notice that LEMONDE is spelled almost exactly like lemonade? I couldn't figure out a concise joke about that but I spent like a half hour trying to figure one out. Ah well, scripts don't go out because they're done, they go out because they're due. C'est la vie. Let me know in the comments if you can figure out what the joke should have been. Also hey, look at you, pausing the video to read this. Thanks for helping my algorithmic performance."

[@Dracopol]

Lemonade in French is Limonade. There was a joke where Citroën, a French car make, was a lemon (citron) with an extra letter...

[@LIA-52]

@@Dracopol Lol and here in Dutch, the lemon is basically Citroën but without the umlaut thingy, so citroen, and we always say that word, even when referring to the car.

[@shigekax]

When life gives you lemonde

[@yigityargic2814]

My answer to the scriptwriter: I didn't even see the text, but I laughed because the video was showing lemonade while Sam was talking about le monde. I think that was a good joke just like that

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

@@yigityargic2814 You're just going to let the animator take credit for the scriptwriter's joke?

[@moojuiceuk]

In the UK, there was Prestel which was a similar service, run by British Telecom, employing teletext style text / graphics and dialing up to a centralised Prestel server. Elsewhere there were vatious private Bulletin Board Systems you could dial into around the world. Nothing quite as expansive, popular and long lasting as Minitel of course.

[@user-jk2zm7uq5s]

In Germany they hat BTX...BUT: it wasn't a thing (You had read about it in the newspaper but you didn't know anyone who had actually ever seen one in the wild). Rumor has it that Minitel actually was a thing just west of the border (you knew someone who had actually used it more than once - if you were French that is).

[@rparl]

Back in the day, I used a bulletin board system (BBS) which was part of the Wild Net network. I dialed into a local system, downloaded new material from selected topics, uploaded my replies to topics, and hung up. Then, offline, I perused the messages, replied to some, generated some new material, and repeated the connection the next day. The local hubs, the regional hubs, and the central star hubs did a complicated dance near midnight which ensured that everyone could have their replies the next day.

[@easyestentertainment3753]

My parents still call internet the minitel lol It is also the source of great memes in France

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Feel like this internet should be called the maxitel.

[@Sacto1654]

I think Minitel worked becuase it was mostly a text-based system, which has a relatively low overhead for data transfers. Minitel was finally rendered obsolete (in my opinion) when surfing on the Internet became reasonably fast by 2011, even before 4G LTE became widely available.

[@fenrirr22]

By 2011 the internet was far above reasonably fast, it had everything it has today just a bit slower. In Hungary, ADSL replaced the phone-based web in 2005, and that was the start of the internet revolution here. By 2011 we'd already had social media, torrent, online games, and video-sharing websites for many years so it is really hard to believe, that in France Minitel became obsolete, and the net got reasonably fast only in 2011.

[@Sacto1654]

@@fenrirr22 For clarification: I'm referring to Internet speeds exceeding 50 megabits/second. Above that didn't really become common (at least here in the USA) until the last 7 years.

[@fischX]

Banking and paying fees.

[@user-tg2km]

@@fenrirr22 Don't worry, @Sacto1654 seems really young like the internet just came about 10 years ago. People in their teens/early 20's keep doing this. I was downloading music in 1998, downloading movies and online gaming (Counterstrike) in 2000, using social media in 2003. After 56k went everything became fast enough, it's just now you do so much on one connection, instead of getting annoyed with your sibling when they're downloading and your ping spikes when you're gaming lol.

[@PacdemonStudios1]

@@user-tg2km even after 2011 I remember having to time my game downloads at night so that it wouldn't eat up all our bandwidth

[@tenalafel]

A few things from an insider. ( I've been working in Telecoms for 20+ years now ) Minitel was already a zombie by 2012. ( understand : nobody except those that still had a terminal or a modem and knew of a number to connect to beyond 3615 ( that was already dead ) used it ). 2012 was the year the underlying TRANSPAC X.25 network was officially shutdown ( officiously it wasn't shutdown for several years after that date due to special customers ). What mainly killed the Minitel was the advent of ADSL, and the push to deploy it all over France... Why bother with a 2400bauds ( with a Minitel 2 ) monochrome, Text based screen when you can have it on your brand new PC with a 512K/64K ( or more ) ADSL link. Now what needs to be understood about the Minitel is that French people could do almost everything that can be done nowadays : book train/plane tickets, book hotel rooms, check bank accounts, look for a job, read news, chat, send mails, ... And since it was free ( except the 3615 cost tied to the service used after calling 3615 [ and many 'general services' were free on 3615 ] ) it was way cheaper than all the ISPs connections ( before ADSL ) and the early Web. Last, at that point in time France was one of the lead country when it came to telecom research and standard. The CNET ( Centre National d'Etude des Télécommunications ) was recognized worldwide as the French equivalent of the Bell Labs, and many ITU telecom protocol standards evolved from French protocols. But in the end, yeah, The minitel rocked... At my parent home it was standing near the Amstrad PC1512 ( even if we never tried to us the Minitel as a modem for the PC... which was something it could do ), and in my early working days I spent hours booking train tickets ( and in some cases hotel rooms ) and filling reports to a private Minitel server for work.

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

+

[@aahln]

lot of these words flew over my head admittedly, but that’s still very enlightening. thanks for sharing !

[@TheZmusicGroup]

J'étais gamin mais je me rappelle qu'on pouvait aussi y chercher des soluces de jeux vidéo ! Je me rappelle encore de la tête de Lara Croft qui s'affichait via une trame de lignes blanches a l'écran haha

[@modenoatr]

I'm French, and it was pretty interesting as a kid reading my uncles' old teen magazines and seeing a bunch of ads for 3615 video games and such. Also my grandfather, a former librarian, kept using his terminal all the way to the end to access public library catalogues; the switch to using the Internet was pretty rough for him.

[@GrayBlood1331]

I always watch two of these videos back to back to get a full serving of "interesting".

[@karanaima]

genius

[@jeffersonott4357]

“The traditional French presidents role of having affairs while balding.” Legend

[@zebinamastero7671]

How can I pray for you today, specifically? You were highlighted to me! We are meant to help one another And life is hard so I wanted to encourage you today that having a prayer life can make life more simpler for you. God wants You to solely depend on Him for everything you want and need. Did you ever come to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior? I feel like He is truly knocking on your heart today🕊🙏😊

[@jeffersonott4357]

@@zebinamastero7671 no thank you.

[@foobarFR]

Minitel prepared french families for the Internet. Two examples : When I was a kid, my older siblings had to file their inscription to University on the Minitel. When I finished highschool myself, University simply switched the inscription process from minitel to internet, and it worked perfectly. To find phone numbers, we used the phonebook service on the minitel (3615 pagesblanches) - when Internet arrived we immediatly switched to the website. The minitel created a "digital reflex". The real reason Internet took time to take off is the monopoly of France Telecom. Once FT (who was privatized and became Orange) lost its monopoly, communication prices litteraly plummeted (at those times, you spent for the phone 40€/month on subscription fees AND paid time fees for communications, even local ones and 30€/month for a RTC based internet line - when private sector came in, we started to pay 19€/month for a "triple play" subscription including illimited ADSL internet access, illimited phone, and cable TV!). Most French families immediatly went from no Internet to ADSL. Very few people knew RTC modems in their lives.

[@Poutrel]

10 million monthly connections in 2009? I've never ever heard anyone using the minitel since the mid 90s, so that's quite a surprise honestly.

[@cleanerben9636]

Tbf that's only a million people using the service maybe a couple times per week or less. Put like that it doesn't seem that busy.

[@Poutrel]

@@cleanerben9636 that's still 1/60 of France population. Seems very very high to me. But i guess it could just be some business processes that somehow never got canceled or something

[@astree214]

@@Poutrel All business bank relations, and also gov relations for companies, were on minitel until the late 2000's ... because being centralised, it was very safe

[@Poutrel]

@@astree214 makes sense!

[@jeltje50]

​@@Poutrel 1/6*

[@crossmeister]

One serious omission is that the very first service, 3611, was also the most popular and free: the French phone book lookup!

[@PrincessFelicie]

Ah, Minitel, that’s a name I haven’t heard in forever. I’m pretty sure that was how we got to download compressed to hell and back ringtones and wallpapers on our Nokia brick telephones back in the day, too.

[@LutraLovegood]

That was early internet IIRC

3:56 "they use Euros now" this really got me hahahhaa

[@Croz89]

I wonder if there's anything out there that allows TCP/IP packets to carry minitel data, allowing terminals to work over a modern internet connection. I'm sure a bunch of retro computer nerds would be interested.

[@loganmacgyver2625]

It has an RS-232 serial interface, you can use it as a glass TTY

[@Patrickpisawesome]

Actually yes and it wasn’t that hard to do. Pretty much since the start of the internet people used emulators to do so. The problem now is that central minitel server don’t exist and would be pointless to do. Don’t be too disappointed though, knowing the internet, someone has probably made a minitel like website for you to use.

[@Croz89]

@@Patrickpisawesome I do wonder how hard it would be to host your own minitel server on some off the shelf hardware, could even use content aggregation from a few API's (now that RSS is dead) to automatically generate and update content.

[@arleas]

When US Videotel tried to make Minitel a thing in Texas, they had an updated "box" that could do ASCII terminal mode and connect to regular bulletin board services. It was as easy as hitting a keystroke combo to switch modes and off you went. The built in modem was pretty slow though.

[@brianbarker2551]

they used to offer minitel emulators, I had one for a bit in the late 2000s. Couldn't do anything as I wasn't in France, but it was fun to at least see what it looked like

[@biancachristie]

I remember hearing about the Minitel in a college communications course in the 80s. Our instructor told us that the French, being the French, mostly used the mail/chat functions for assignations and sexting, and I thought, I don’t think that has anything to do with being French-that’s a stupid stereotype. A few years later, as the World Wide Web arrived in all its glory, I noticed how much time and industry people were using for online dating, conducting affairs, looking at porn, etc., here in supposedly Puritanical America.

[@jadenanjara]

Today I learned that the machine I thought was just another very old computer in my childhood was actually an alternate version of the internet I currently am on

[@jdatlas4668]

Surely Minitel is at least 70% as interesting. It's sort of more BBS than web, but pretty cool, and it's a shame most attempts to build similar failed to varying degrees from sort of (Prestel, UK) to brutally (BTX, Germany) :D

[@niconois]

there were even multiplayer games available via the minitel (very basic games)

[@kalebbruwer]

Minitel sounds like a 1984 ministry, so it's pretty funny that it failed for being too centralized

[@loganmacgyver2625]

It failed because it was too obsolete by 2012

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

@@loganmacgyver2625 Of course, because 2012 is a long way away from 1984.

[@blankseventydrei]

My wife used Minitel for me to check out what documents I needed for the French driver licences. Interesting, the had a web emulator to interact with it. I though it a clear and easy way to find the list of items you needed.

[@enyrox]

This is very well explained, I've never seen a French video talking about this this precisely and quickly, well done!

[@mathieuDBilly]

If you want, there's this one kzbin.info/www/bejne/pYHGioGNprCoeJI

[@hugostdr5240]

A French Channel did it if you want to see it;)

[@yesterdaysrose5446]

In Finland we had similar dial-up services, TeleSampo and Infotel. (Though, our phone company wasn't nice enough to give people free terminals! You needed to get your own computer and a modem! I did see public Minitel terminals when I was on vacation in Paris and found them rad as hell.) My first way of accessing the Internet was through Freenet, which was a service for school students, and you got there via these services. I remember my father accessing the banking services via TeleSampo as well. (I remember him complaining about the 2-factor authentication, which was done as a list of one-use number pairs. Funny thing, when I signed up for my own Internet bank access, the bank still used the same system... and continues to do so to this day, technically, though now they also use a phone app as an authenticator.)

[@kevinlspg3135]

Valérie Giscard D'estaing went to top French engineering school : Polytechnique. He was very curious about tech in general and knew who to listen to. A rare quality among politicians.

[@ambergris5705]

So if I understand correctly, the World Wide Web is now public for 29 years old (1993, exists for 33 if you count the invention in 1989), while Minitel existed for 34 years in total (1978-2012). So the Minitel is for now still longer lasting than the Internet.

[@SuperSMT]

Well the "internet" is a lot older than the world wide web

[@ambergris5705]

@@SuperSMT Fair, and the phone is much older than the Minitel too. But if we speak about usability of the services to the layman audience, then the modern phenomenon of the Internet as a new world has to be counted from the inception of the WWW, don't you think?

[@astree214]

I was a (french) student (computer studies) in the late 70s, and we could already connect to a kind of "web" (not the www we know today) between universities and exchange data with the US at this time And guess what were the most important data flow between US and EU male students at this time ? Some "very nice girl photos" 😂

[@niconois]

@@SuperSMT and the tech used by the minitel is also much older than the minitel, I think he meant to compare the minitel itself and the WWW, from a consumer perspective

[@mbathroom1]

Last time I was this early, Minitel still existed

[@benoitbvg2888]

I remember a French musician who, during a stupid interview, was asked "what is your favorite military event in history" and he replied "the Minitel bill I left my garrison when I was doing my service there".

[@zeGolem83]

1:19 minor nitpick: This is the new 2019 AFNOR AZERTY layout, that nobody uses, and was, for sure, not used back when the minitels existed, due to, well… being from 2019…

[@tomrogue13]

Time travel. Duh

[@shigekax]

Wow babe new azerty just dropped With the exact same letters as the current one even though more are printed and they just moved around it enough for me to probably never pick that one up

[@MrKnoppersesser]

Like in many other countries at the time the German Postservice had a similar idea. Basically a beefed up Teletext which worked via the phone line. You could get a device, connect it to your TV and off you go.

[@loganmacgyver2625]

And even Kraftwerk made a reference to it in the German version of computer love

[@niconois]

yes, it became huge in France because every household had one for free, so a lot of services were developped, you could book your train, plane, hotel, there were dating services, online chat, multiplayer games, also results from official school exams were on the minitel...

[@damiengitt]

Some of the main lasting use of Minitel was due to the safe centralized system you could use to make card payments proper Chips and Pin one’s All seconde génération terminal had a card reader built in

[@loduk102]

Sam, if I end up buying a Nebula subscription it'll be because of you. You're funny and informative. I can listen to you talk all day.

[@magentasound_]

I read the title as “surprisingly successful internet competition”

[@dustinm2717]

There is actually a lot of really interesting history from the early age of internet and networking (note that i say just internet, not the Internet) Like, how it wouldn't have been impossible to have ended up in a world where europe and north america had an entirely different internet (TCP/IP in North America, probably some version of OSI in Europe) but as you can probably tell this didn't happen, TCP/IP while a bit funky was good enough and already working so it spread before others got a foothold anywhere so OSI just fell through But there are actually a handful of alternate internet's that were developed and theoretically could have existed at scale and taken off existing entirely independently of the web on its own technology stack But in the end we just got the Web, and just one internet, which probably is for the best (could you imagine not being able to just load some random site from the other side of the internet for no reason without a bridge) But i honestly *really* wanna see the alternate worlds where other internet protocols made it before the web could spread, i really wanna see the alternate realities that could have existed for the internet(s) Like I really wanna explore the other internets that could have existed, i wanna know what would have happened if 2 incompatible internets got too big for one to be phased out But alas I'll never know (and the implications of actually being able to find out would be far more terrifying and far reaching than woah alternate history, the ability to view into other realities would have massive implications for everything)

[@LutraLovegood]

Being able to see into other realities would be the biggest technological boom ever, maybe save for GAI singularity

[@97Corvi]

In Italy we where tring to do something also similar to the internet 🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹 It was caller "OSIRIDE", as the egyptian God, and It would have been based on the ISO/OSI protocol, which at the time was tring to do a lot of the same thing that internet would have done with the protocols ICP/IP, but not with a "best effot" connection like on the internet, but with a varety of type of connections that the user could have choosen. So theoretically someone could have asked for a minimum ensured stable connection and word on that. But at the end we became connected to the American internet connection through satellite, and the project died :/

[@fb55255]

Small correction, the WWW (which is the internet every one uses) is Swiss not american, and little to no Internet traffic is done through satellite it's all wired

[@97Corvi]

@@fb55255 i was talking about the First connection between Pisa and the American network, that was fine though satellite in 1986. My misteke for the www origin, Sorry 😅

[@extragoogleaccount6061]

@@fb55255 It was created by an English citizen while working at CERN. Not sure that makes it "Swiss."

[@Yosh-wt4lg]

@@extragoogleaccount6061 and the cern is both in switzerland and france.

[@Freezyloen]

3:15 If it's followed up by an ablativus. More often than not it actually means "when"

[@mousermind]

Minitel would have fit in perfectly with the other institutions, Miniluv, Minipax, and Minitrue.

[@BeantownMrs]

This video unlocked some core memories about using the French in Action textbook/videos in college and having Mireille show Robert the Minitel in her house.

[@sebastienmorel2950]

I still have the interface I made (quite easily) to connect a Minitel terminal to the RS232 port of a computer. In my case, I used an Atari 520ST and the ZZ-Com software. It allowed to display pages in colors (although the servers generated color videotext pages, the Minitel terminal has a monochrome display) and to record pages in order to read them offline later (useful because each minute of connection was charged).

[@CinemaDemocratica]

I haven't literally LOL'd at an HAI video for a long time, but the "How can we use this to be aggressively horny" line had me spitting coffee.

[@Bananappleboy]

4:25 I'm litterally watching this on an android with a cracked screen connected to an internet wifi router that I didn't set on my own...

[@tatert3337]

"...an extremely cracked iPhone using your neighbor's internet connection." The man knows his audience!

[@astree214]

French here. In the early 80's I used to book a train on the minitel to go and visit my girlfriend in Germany ... still with her today ;-) I could also read news, chat with friends, get a weather report, book a cinema ticket, access my bank account ... and play multiplayer online video games ! While most other countries didn't even know that existed. I remember an american friend coming to France in summer, he couldn't believe what he saw 🙂 But like always, France can have very nice ideas, before all others, and then be unable to make them great ideas, and at the end go back behind others because the government didn't want to believe in internet :-/ The biggest power of the minitel was that for most public services, and trains, banks, planes, cinemas, ... , it was free, and the terminal itself was free for everybody if you had a phone line.

[@inreallife530]

For anyone wondering I’m pretty sure 6,000,000,000 Francs is about 980 million US Dollars.

[@galuk5565]

My dad used to fall asleep in front of his minitel when using the 3615 Ulla. He stopped that when my grandma received a bill of 15 000 francs at the end of the month (~2000$). Fortunately she was working at the PTT.

[@aashd9245]

1:51 The video might get checked by YT

[@jackthrowsdiscs]

Shoutout to Julien Mailland, the world’s expert on Minitel

[@lalalalalanalana]

This. This video doesn't cite its obvious sources clearly enough

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

I've used Minitel! It was available at all La Poste offices & most public libraries!

[@AndoCommando1000]

I remember going on an exchange trip to France back in 2001 and the French family I stayed with had a Minitel in their house. I thought it was a bit odd but also intrigued by it. I assumed it was kind of like a standalone computerised phone book or something with its own old-looking green-text on black screen cathode ray tube monitor. Even back in 2001 though, phone books were still a thing and it wasn't culturally ingrained even then to just google phone numbers on the internet - so back then I did think it was kind of useful and pretty interesting.

[@LutraLovegood]

Google was unheard of in France in 2001.

[@Dracopol]

In Canada, Bell Canada (the phone monopoly serving Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec) put out AlexTel terminals, dumb terminals with a slow 1200 bps speed that was rapidly outclassed in the early 1990s. They charged a monthly rental and some services were expensive per minute. Bell Canada discontinued it in 1994.

[@tictac2therevenge291]

implying canada is real

[@JamesPhieffer]

Then they put out those phones with the massive (for the time) screens, and soft keys to access stuff. They sucked.

[@Leonyithas]

*THATS* what that flipping company is. When I visited Montreal and Toronto I kept seeing your leftover phone booths and the company buildings but was never curious enough to learn the full range of the company or it’s status among Canadians. That’s a good name for a telecom corporation. It’s both pleasant to say and subtly, implicatively, dystopian.

[@aeronautic2374]

I don't understand how these people decide what Stock footage they should use for their videos. Their creativity is astounding!

[@FacterinoCommenterino]

Today's fact: Both Nicholas Cage and Michael Jackson shared the same wife, Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.

[@Musicenjoyer912]

@Bully Maguire 🅥 shut up stop impersonating the real bully.

[@MrPaxio]

that used to be alot more common until they literally outlawed it and put in laws for single pair marriages to "make it fair" for the simps

[@dstinnettmusic]

@@MrPaxio he didn’t mean at the same time you weirdo.

[@tolep]

But only one of them actually had sex with her.

[@kostasgeorgiou2417]

@@dstinnettmusic lol

[@IGNACY-fp8zo]

I was literally just thinking “what if someone just made their own internet?” and then I saw this video

[@verdatum]

I did a report on Mini-tel in college in 2005. It was amazing. It was beautiful. It was a throwaway joke in Archer.

[@jonjohnson2844]

A lot of countries had these to be honest; Prestel in the UK is a bit older than Minitel although didn't last as long and had nowhere near the penetration although BBS was fairly popular among us nerds even after the internet was established.

[@simonpowell9975]

The existence was nothing like the adoption, though - the same chicken-and-egg problem with many technologies. Having the terminals be free and part of an existing service you already paid for solved one half of the problem, which made it worthwhile for suppliers to develop for the platform.

[@guaposneeze]

One quibble is that I wouldn't really refer to it as a competitor or alternative to the Internet. That's an obvious framing in retrospect. But in 1978 when the idea was picking up steam, the Internet was an obscure thing with zero applicability to end users at home. Minitel had hardware in use by 1980, and commercial wide release by 1982. Arpanet wasn't even upgraded to IPv4 until 1983, five years later. At that point the Internet was still wildly obscure, but 1983 is basically the "birthday" of the modern Internet because that's as far back as you can trace any real backwards compatibility. Commercial dial up service wasn't available until 1989, so that's the first time it really crossed any sort of overlap with Minitel as a service for general home users.

[@tenalafel]

ARPANET was X.25 based when the Minitel development started like the TRANSPAC network that composed the backbone of the Minitel ( Teletel ). And the real overlap with Minitel didn't really occur before 1998 with the advent of ADSL.

[@astrawby]

I did not expect to be reminded of 3615ULLA by an English speaker today

[@jmpattillo]

I remember reading about this in my french class in high school in the late 80s

[@thepug991]

Some of the best jokes you’ve had in this video. Love other videos but you had me laughing really hard

[@Shomononosh]

Also, for a while, France Telecom (the successor of PTT) made it so that you would be able to access Minitel with standard computers the same way you'd use Internet at the time, by plugging it into the landline

[@xnetpc]

1i remember hearing about minitel in France back in the 80's. It seemed like a nationalized version of Quantum Link, which later morphed into America Online. Prodigy and Compuserve were similar services before the world wide web was available to consumers. I thought the concept of minitel was interesting because it had been adopted nationwide. I did not know France's telecom provider was state owned at the time, but it makes sense to me now. In the 1980s, most of my online presence was through local bulletin boards, which provided a very different experience to actually being on a network. I wonder if any of minitel's innovations became part of the internet we use today?

[@youcantata]

Minitel had a distinct advantage over internet: payment and account. All purchase was billed on telephone bill. No credit card needed. No separate account registration except minitel account. No separate id, password for each online shopping mall or service. All store and transaction was secure, tracked and protected by phone company.

[@honkhonk8009]

Isnt that litterally a disadvantage. Why would I want a singular company to manage all my data like that, and be absolutely blocked from using any other system/company.

[@yesterdaysrose5446]

@@honkhonk8009 Really? In the modern Internet, there's just a handful of secure payment processing companies (PayPal, Google, Apple, Microsoft, a few smaller ones, and all of the national/regional ones), and most people are reluctant to just give their card information to random-ass websites... for a darn good reason. So things haven't exactly changed, have they?

[@sylv_ain]

As a French, 3615 something brings back so many memories

[@DimBeam1]

My French Exchange students family had one.

[@DimBeam1]

1993/94 ish.

[@noytelinu]

Look, you keep pushing Nebula, and while I have it, renewal doesn't seem likely to me. One, despite the reasoning being too make videos without worrying about the algorithm, besides the modern conflict series, basically everything in there doesn't seem unfriendly to youtube. Two, there's very few actual exclusives, with one of my favorites, Technorama, being something that could have been on KZbin anyway. Meaning, since I'm patient I am only really signing up for the few exclusives. While the HAI and related channels do try to fill it up, frankly only you, Tom Scott, and Tech Altar really try. There's so much wasted potential on there that it is hard to justify. Three, the Curiosity Stream bundle sounds good, but Curiosity Stream is even more disappointing. It's a worse national geographic, which I already have, and I have found only 1 good documentry on there, which, surprise, surprise, was done by Veritasium. The Butterfly Effect in particular was painfully bad, as it took a good premise and botched it badly. Like, I have issues with Alternate History Hub being way too vague at times and even then he does a better job than what that did. Why tease the audience with alternate possibilities and then not even show them? 4, double watching. So, because most of the time it is just early access, it makes me not want to watch it on KZbin if I do watch it there since I already watched it. Which means my own algorithm is messed up since I'm watching fewer videos here and so on. Yes, it is cheap, but it seems more of a waste to me than anything and it needs to improve.

[@MattRosey]

Pepe Le Pewdiepie is the best pun you’ve ever made, and that says a lot

[@sage5296]

"To put that into perspective, today, 6 million francs could buy you nothing." Bruh lmfao

[@fqidz]

When life gives you lemons, the French make Lemonde-nade

[@PawFromTheBroons]

At some point, I even had the portable/foldable version on our Minitel. They're quite scarce. I do wish I'd kept mine, really...

[@TimCortesi]

There were lots of closed, curated networks back in the 90s which were alternatives to the generally open "world wide web" that we know and use today. AOL (America Online) is one such example. In the early days of AOL, they didn't even bundle it with a web browser, you could only access their curated set of services, served up by their own servers. I wouldn't necessarily call that an internet alternative, but it was certainly an alternative to the world wide web.

[@PsRohrbaugh]

I love that the nebula advertisement at the end still shows the same Gravity Falls video after all these years

[@rogink]

I'm guessing this worked like 'dial-up' modems. So when someone was using Minitel it tied up the phone line, and no one else in the house could use the landline. Of course before 2000 not many had mobile phones, so after that it seems less important that you couldn't make or receive calls. As with so many advances in tech - and this certainly was one - it doesn't actually pay to be first out of the blocks, because others will take your tech and adapt and standardise it, and make it cheaper to use and innovate.

[@BruneSixtine]

The the TCP/IP model of nowadays Internet is based on the work of Hubert Zimmermann and Louis Pouzin, designer of the CYCLADES network.

[@BlueJayWaters]

"Outlived John Lennons solo career." Ouch shots fired Oh wait...

[@Dracopol]

NO CARRIER.

[@mrmimeisfunny]

I still don't get how Minitel doesn't count as just part of the internet. Especially because at that time you used phone numbers to connect to the internet. It just seems like telnet to me.

[@lours6993]

Let me help you out: This was 15 years before the internet.

[@csmlyly5736]

"The" internet

[@NullStaticVoid]

My mom had a Minitel in SF back in the early 90's. She may have seemed like a silly hippie artist. But she was always trying out new tech and was the goto old lady for other old ladies with tech problems. I think she mostly used hers for recipes and astrology.

[@TheZmusicGroup]

I remember this very well, I used to look up the guide to the first Tomb Raider games on the Minitel

[@adriendesentenac]

Nice video, that brought back some memories of using it in the 90's, and then we got some free AOL CDs and that was the beginning of the end for Minitel 😄

[@Dracopol]

There is a rock stratum for the K-T Boundary (the rock layer of high iridium from the meteorite that drove the dinosaurs extinct, 63 million years ago). Now there will be the AOL layer, the thin boundary from all the unused AOL trial CD-ROMs sent in mail and magazines all over the world!

[@Hope_Boat]

The terminal were not totally free. They replaced the paper phone-books the PTT had to provide free of charge to any customer asking for it. Once you received a Minitel you could not ask for he paper version of the phone-book but there was a free of charge online service available by dialing 36 14. You could also use a computer and a regular modem since there were Minitel emulated terminals for many systems of that era. I had one on my Amiga 1200.

[@jimroscovius]

Reminds me of when I paid $6.00/hr for Compuserve access back in the '80s. Lightning fast 300 baud modem connected to my TRS-80. Those were the days!!

[@panz.564]

2:18 it took me 15 tries to get it so figured i should save you the time: "Did you notice that LEMONDE is spelled almost exactly like lemonade? I couldn't figure out a concise joke about that but I spent like a half hour trying to figure one out. Ah well, scripts don't go out because they're done, they go out because they're due. C'est la vie. Let me know in the comments if you can figure out what the joke should have been. Also hey, look at you, pausing the video to read this. Thanks for helping my algorthmic performance."

[@pumaconcolor2855]

I'm not sure if it would have saved you time but it's possible to navigate youtube videos frame by frame. Just pause them and then use the '.' key to go forward one frame and the ',' key to go backward one frame.

[@kamilst96]

When video is paused, you can use "," and "." to navigate frame-by-frame. Very useful in such situations.

[@xerofetus]

A modestly cracked Samsung A8 Tablet and the Tim Horton's wifi, thank you very much. Digressing...

[@rgbaal]

Minitel survived because it never had to make a profit. No matter how high the losses the tax payer bailed them out. After about 2005 most services were dead except phonebook and the important one - secure electronic funds transactions. There was a kit that you could fit to a std minitel terminal that allowed processing of Credit Card transactions. So you would see terminals in shops/restaurants etc being used for that. Once secure moved to the net that was the end of minitel.

[@alexv3357]

The humour in this episode was home run after home run I gotta say

[@singletona082]

Makes me wish Ma Bell, then the Baby Bells did this. Part of your phone subscription goes towards a BBS that the local Baby Bell runs and from there fido into other servers that central server takes rent from for the potential added traffic (like, ten bucks a month from the server for the listing.) That would've honestly been pretty neat.

[@ChiefOfAss]

I love Nebuler, I'm an "Old" and it's like the History Channel, but good. Amaze content not about Ancient Aliens. Please don't let it die you scrappy kids!

[@greenaum]

Minitel was funded by scrapping the Directory Enquiries, or Les Enquirants du Directorie, or something like that. They scrapped Directory Enquiries, which was a free service and cost the telco quite a few francs. Instead, you could look up phone numbers on your Minitel, having access to more or less the same database that Directory Enquiries had, only you'd do the work yourself. This money is why they could give away terminals for free. That was it's initial purpose. But then, obviously, once it's there, it's going to expand, and so it did. But point is, it pretty much funded itself by modernising an outdated service. Any country could have done it, with the political will. Incidentally in the 1990s, before any talk of scrapping Minitel, I was in Paris, looking at junk shops. They were stuffed to the gills with old Minitel terminals, all the different variations and options you could get. Perhaps at the time people were buying PCs and using them instead, the Internet had started to reach the public, but at that point, the smarter end of the public. Before the masses signed up for Facebook, Whatsapp, and Simple Harmless Voluntary Brain Implant. Back then we communicated in text through modems. Was great, the early days of Internet culture.

[@welfiblablabla]

I can still remember the ads on radio saying to go to 3615-*"name of the radio station"*

[@Ligmamonkey]

The idea of France of all places having their own network structure is truly terrifying.

[@sans_hw187]

Are we that evil? Don’t be afraid we weren’t scheming to take over the world, just making train reservations and online purchases.

[@QlueDuPlessis]

We had Beltel in South Africa Beltel was discontinued in the early to mid ninties

[@SamTaylorsVersion]

3:56 he's not wrong

[@andreasm6636]

Vive la France

[@mrsupremegascon]

@Family guy 🅥 thats an original scam.