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In the spring of 1981, after several small trials, the French Telecommunications Administration (Direction générale des Télécommunications, DGT) began a large-scale experiment to implement the technology in Brittany, in a place called Ile and Vilaine, named after two rivers flowing nearby. It was a prelude to the full-scale launch of the system throughout planned for next year. The DGT called the new system Télétel, but pretty quickly everyone started calling it Minitel [Minitel] - it was derived from the name , which were distributed free of charge by the hundreds of thousands to French telephone service subscribers.
Among all consumer information services systems in this “era of fragmentation,” Minitel deserves our special attention, and therefore a separate chapter in this story, for three specific reasons.
All articles in the series:
- History of the relay
- History of electronic computers
- History of the transistor
- Internet history
- Era of Fragmentation
The first is the motive for its creation. Other postal, telegraphic and telephone services have also built systems based on videotex technology - but in no other country has such an effort been put into achieving success with this system, and there has not been such a well-thought-out strategy for using this success. Minitel was intimately intertwined with the hope of France's economic and strategic renaissance, and was supposed to not only generate new telecommunications revenues or new traffic, but also spur France's entire tech sector.
The second is the degree of its distribution. DGT provided telephone subscribers with terminals completely free of charge, and collected all the money solely for the time they used the service, without having to pay upfront for a subscription. This meant that, although many of them did not use the system as often, more people still had access to Minitel than even the largest American online services of the 1980s, despite a much smaller population. The system looks even more contrasting against the background of the British Prestel, which never went beyond 100 subscribers.
The third is the architecture of the server side. All other digital service providers were monolithic, hosting all services on their own hardware. Together, they may have formed a competitive market, but each of their systems was an administrative-command economy inside. Minitel, despite the fact that the state had a monopoly on this product, ironically became the only system of the 1980s that created a free market for information services. The DGT acted as an information broker, not a provider, and provided one of the possible models for ending the era of fragmentation.
The game of catch-up
Experiments with Minitel began in Brittany not by chance. In the decades since World War II, the French government has deliberately shifted the region's economy, largely based on agriculture and fishing, to electronics and telecommunications. This also applied to the two largest telecommunications research laboratories located there: the Center Commun d'Études de Télévision et Télécommunications (CCETT) in the capital of the Rene region, and the Center National d'Études des Télécommunications (CNET) division in Lannion, on the north coast.
CCETT laboratory in Rennes
These laboratories, founded in an attempt to pull up a lagging region into the modern era, by the late 1960s and early 1970s themselves became involved in catching up with their counterparts from other countries. By the end of the 1960s, France's telephone network was in disgrace for a country that, under de Gaulle's leadership, wanted to see itself as a resurgent world power. It was still heavily dependent on the telephone exchanges built in the first decades of the 1967th century, and by 75 only 100% of them were automated. The rest of its parts depended on operators who switched calls manually - from which both the United States and the countries of Western Europe practically got rid of. There were only 13 telephones per 21 inhabitants in France, compared to 50 in neighboring Britain and almost XNUMX in countries with the most developed telecommunications systems, such as Sweden and the United States.
Therefore, by the 1970s, France began to actively invest in the program , i.e. "catch-up". Rattrapage quickly gained momentum after the 1974 elections, when , and appointed Gerard Teri as the new head of the DGT. Both were graduates of the best engineering school in France, l'École Polytechnique [Paris Polytechnic], and both believed in the possibility of improving society through technology. Teri worked to improve the flexibility and responsiveness of the bureaucracy at the DGT, while Giscard secured 100 billion francs in Parliament to modernize the telephone network. That money went to install millions of new phones and replace old equipment with computerized switches. Thus, France got rid of its reputation as a country lagging behind in telephony.
Meanwhile, in other countries that began to develop telecommunications in new directions, new technologies appeared - video phones, fax machines and a mixture of computer services with data networks. DGT wanted to ride this wave and not play catch-up again and again. In the early 1970s, Britain announced the creation of two separate teletex systems that delivered changing information screens to televisions via broadcast. CCETT, a joint venture between DGT and the French broadcasting corporation Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF), launched two of its projects in response. The DIDON (Diffusion de données sur un réseau de television) project was designed according to the British model. ANTIOPE (Acquisition numérique et télévisualisation d'images organisées en pages d'ecriture - digital acquisition and display of images assembled into pages of text) was a more ambitious attempt to explore the possibility of delivering screens of text regardless of the communication channel.
Bernard Marty in 2007
The ANTIOPE team in Rennes was led by Bernard Marty. He was another graduate of the Polytechnic School (class of 1963), and moved to CCETT from ORDF, where he specialized in computer animation and digital television. In 1977, the team combined ANTIOPE display technology with ideas taken from CNET's TIC-TAC (terminal intégré comportant téléviseur et appel au clavier) project. The latter was a system for delivering interactive digital services over the telephone. This merger was called TITAN (Terminal interactif de télétexte à appel par numérotation) and was essentially the equivalent of the British Viewdata system later evolved into Prestel. Like ANTIOPE, it used televisions to display pages of digital information, but it allowed users to interact with the computer rather than just passively receiving data. In addition, both computer commands and data screens were transmitted over telephone wires, not over the air. Unlike Viewdata, TITAN supported a full-size alphanumeric keyboard rather than just a phone keyboard. To demonstrate the system's capabilities at a Berlin trade fair, the team used the French Transpac packet switching network as an intermediary between the terminals and the CCETT computer located in Rennes.
Teri's lab had put together an impressive tech demo, but by that point it hadn't gone outside the lab, and there were no obvious ways for ordinary people to use it.
Telematique
In the autumn of 1977, DGT director Gerard Teri, satisfied with the progress made in modernizing the telephone network, switched to competing with the British videotex system. To develop a strategic response, he first studied the experience of CCETT and CNET, and found TITAN and TIC-TAC prototypes ready for use. He took these raw experimental materials to his DAII development office to be turned into products with a clear go-to-market and business strategy.
DAII recommended the development of two projects: an experiment with videotex to test various services in a city near Versailles, and an investment in an electronic telephone directory to replace the phone book. The projects were to use Transpac as the network infrastructure and TITAN technology on the client side, complete with color images, symbolic graphics, and a full keyboard input.
An early experimental model of a Télétel set-top box, later abandoned in favor of an integrated terminal
The videotex implementation strategy developed at DAII differed from the British one in three important respects. First, if Prestel hosted all the content itself, DGT planned to operate only as a switchboard through which users could reach any number of different private service providers running any computers capable of connecting to Transpac and outputting any ANTIOPE compatible data. Secondly, they decided to abandon the TV as a monitor, and rely on special integrated terminals. The DGT leaders reasoned that people were buying TVs to watch TV and would not want to occupy the screen with new services like an electronic phone book. In addition, the elimination of televisions meant that DGT would not have to negotiate a launch from the system with competitors from Télédiffusion de France (TDF), followers of ORDF (in Britain, negotiations with TV manufacturers were indeed one of the main obstacles in the way of Prestel). Finally, France has boldly cut this Gordian knot, the chicken-or-egg problem (when a network without users does not attract service providers, and vice versa) by planning to give away all these integrated videotex terminals for free.
But, despite all these grandiose plans, videotex remained in the background for Teri. To ensure DGT's place at the forefront of communications technology, he focused on making fax a nationwide consumer service. He believed that faxing could take a significant portion of the written communication market away from the Post Office, whose bureaucrats the DGT considered moldy conservatives. However, Teri's priority changed in just a few months, by the time the 1978 government report "Computerization of Society" was completed. The report was circulated to bookstores in May, selling 13 copies in the first month and 500 copies in the following decade, which is the equivalent of a bestseller for a government report. How, it would seem, such a technically complex topic captured the minds of citizens?
The Giscard government commissioned this report to be written by Simon Nora and Alain Minck, officials from the French Inspectorate General of Finance, in order to analyze the threats and opportunities of a growing economy and the cultural importance of computers. By the 1970s, most tech-savvy intellectuals were already beginning to understand that computing power could and should be brought to the masses in the form of new types of services that would be powered by computers. But at the same time, the United States led for several decades in all types of digital technologies, and the position of American firms in the market seemed unshakable. On the one hand, French leaders believed that the democratization of computers would provide great opportunities for the French community; on the other hand, they did not want France to become an appendage of a dominant foreign power.
Nora and Mink's report presented a synthesis that solved this problem and proposed a blueprint that would jump-start France into the postmodern information age. The country will immediately move from the position of the last to the position of the leader, creating the first national infrastructure for digital services - computing centers, databases, standardized networks - which will become the foundation of an open and democratic market for digital services. This, in turn, will stimulate the development of its own French experience and industry in the field of computing equipment, software and network technologies.
Nora and Mink called this fusion of computers and communications télématique, combining the words "telecommunications" and informatique ("computer science"). "Until recently," they wrote,
computers remained the privilege of the big and rich. From now on, mass computerization will come to the fore, which will fuel the community, as electricity once did. However, unlike electricity, la télématique will not transmit a passive current, but information.
The Nora-Mink report, and the resonance it caused in the Giscard government, put the attempts to commercialize TITAN in a new light. Prior to this, DGT's videotex development strategy had been a reaction to the actions of British competitors, and aimed at ensuring that France was not taken by surprise and forced to work within the British videotex technical standard. But if that were the case, the French videotex development efforts would have languished like Prestel, remaining a niche service for curious technology buffs and a handful of businesses that could benefit from it.
But after the release of the videotex report, it could no longer be considered anything other than the central component of télématique, the basis for building a new future for the entire French nation, and thanks to the report, the project received much more attention and money than it could have hoped. The project to launch Minitel nationwide received support from the government that might not have otherwise - as happened with Teri's countrywide "faxification" project, which eventually resulted in a simple peripheral addition to Minitel in the form of a printer.
As part of the support, the government decided to give away millions of terminals for free. DGT argued that terminal costs would be partly offset by the discontinuation of paper phone books and network traffic that would drive the Minitel service. Whether they really thought so or not, these arguments could at least nominally justify the massive stimulus program that began with Alcatel (which received billions of francs for making terminals) and moved to the Transpac network, Minitel service providers, computers purchased by these providers, and software services required to run an entire online business.
Intermediary
In a commercial sense, Minitel brought nothing special. For the first time, it reached annual self-sufficiency in 1989, and all the costs for it, if they paid off, only by the end of the 1990s, when the terminals finally fell into decay. Nor did it achieve the goals of Nora and Mink to launch a renaissance of French industry and society through information technology. Alcatel and other manufacturers profited from making telecommunications equipment, and the French network Transpac from increasing traffic, although they, with their X.25 protocol, unfortunately, bet on the wrong packet switching technology. At the same time, thousands of Minitel service providers mainly bought their equipment and system software from the Americans. Techies building their own online services eschewed both the French giant Bull and the big, scary industrial company IBM, in favor of humble boxes of Unix inside from manufacturers like Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard.
If Minitel's industry has failed, what about its role in democratizing the French community with new information services penetrating everywhere from the most elite municipal districts of Paris to the small villages of Picardy? Here the project achieved more, albeit rather mixed, success. The Minitel system grew rapidly, from 120 terminals at the time of the first large-scale implementation in 000 to 1983 million terminals in 3 and 1987 million in 5,6. However, with the exception of the first minutes as an electronic phone book, long-term use of the terminals had to be paid by the minute, so there is no doubt that their use was not as evenly distributed as the equipment itself. The most popular services, namely online chats, could easily burn several hours each evening at a base rate of 1990 francs per hour (roughly $60, more than double the US minimum hourly wage at the time).
However, by 1990, almost 30% of citizens had access to the Minitel terminal from home or work. France was without a doubt the most online country (so to speak) in the world. That same year, the two largest online service providers in the US, the information technology colossus, amassed just over a million subscribers in a country of 250 million people. The catalog of services that could be reached grew as fast as the number of terminals, from 142 in 1983 to 7000 in 1987 and 15 in 000. The irony is that to list all the services available to the terminals, an entire phone book was required - the one that they were supposed to replace. By the late 1990s, this book, Listel, was 1980 pages long.
Man using Minitel terminal
In addition to what DGT offered directly, the range of services provided was very wide, from commercial to social, and they were divided into roughly the same categories that we are used to seeing online today: shopping, banking services, travel services, chat rooms, messaging forums, games. To connect to the service, the user Minitel dialed an access number, most commonly 3615, connecting his telephone line to a special computer at his local exchange, point d'accès vidéotexte, or PAVI. After connecting to PAVI, the user could enter a code corresponding to the desired service. Companies placed their access codes on banner ads in a mnemonic alphanumeric form, much as they would later do with website addresses in later decades: 3615 TMK, 3615 SM, 3615 ULLA.
Code 3615 connected users to the PAVI "kiosk" tariff system, which was introduced in 1984. It allowed Minitel to function like a news kiosk, offering a variety of items for sale from multiple vendors at one convenient point of sale. Of the 60 francs charged per hour for using the kiosk, 40 went to the service, and 20 went to DGT for using PAVI and the Transpac network. And all this was completely transparent to users - all charges automatically appeared on the next phone bill, and they did not need to provide providers with their billing information in order to enter into a financial relationship with them.
When access to the open Internet began to spread in the 1990s, connoisseurs of online services began to these services from the era of fragmentation - all these CompuServe, the AOL - "walled gardens." The metaphor seemed to imply a contrast between them and the open, wilderness of the new internet. From this point of view, if CompuServe was a carefully maintained park, then the Internet was Nature itself. Of course, in reality, the Internet is no more natural than CompuServe or Minitel. Online services can be built in a variety of ways, all based on people's choices. However, if we use this metaphor of the confrontation between the natural and the cultivated, then Minitel falls somewhere in the middle. It can be compared to a national park. Its borders are guarded, maintained, and a toll is collected for crossing them. However, inside them you can move freely and visit any places you are interested in.
The DGT position, which was in the middle of the market, between the user and the service, with a monopoly on the entry point and on the entire communication path between the two participants in the service, had advantages both over monolithic all-in-one service providers like CompuServe and over a more open architecture. later internet. Unlike the first, after passing the bottleneck, the system opened up an open market for services to the user, unlike anything else that existed at that time. Unlike the latter, there were no monetization problems. The user automatically paid for the time they used, so there was no need for the bloated and intrusive ad serving technology that powered the modern Internet. Minitel also offered a secure end-to-end connection. Each bit only traveled through the DGT equipment, so as long as you trusted the DGT and the service provider, your communications were protected from attack.
However, compared to the Internet that replaced the system, it had several obvious drawbacks. For all its relative openness, it was impossible to simply turn on the server, connect it to the network and start working. Granting server access through PAVI required prior government approval. Worse, Minitel's technical framework was horribly inflexible and tied to the videotex protocol, which was state of the art in the mid-1980s but was horribly outdated and limited ten years later.
The degree of rigidity of the Minitel depends on what exactly we will consider the Minitel. The terminal itself (which, strictly speaking, was called Minitel) could connect to any computers via a regular telephone network. However, it is unlikely that many users will use this method - and it is, in fact, no different from using a home computer with a modem from which you connect to services like The Source or CompuServe. It was not connected to the service delivery system (which was officially called Télétel), and all the benefits came from the kiosk and the Transpac network.
The terminal supported text pages, 24 lines of 40 characters per line (with primitive character graphics) - and that's it. None of the salient features of the 1990s web—scrolling text, GIFs, JPEGs, audio streaming—had been available to Minitel.
Minitel offered a potential way out of the era of fragmentation, but no one took advantage of this way outside of France. In 1988, France Télécom bought DGT and tried many times to export the Minitel technology to Belgium, Ireland, and even the US (via a system in San Francisco called 101 Online). However, without a government incentive in the form of terminal funding, none of these attempts came close to the success of the original. And since by that time France Télécom and most other postal, telegraph and telephone networks around the world were expected to start saving in order to successfully operate in a competitive international market, the era in which such incentives were politically justified was over.
And although the Minitel system was fully completed only in 2012, its use has been declining since the mid-1990s. During its decline, it was still relatively popular for banking and financial services due to the security of the network and the availability of terminals and special peripherals capable of reading and transmitting data from bank cards. Otherwise, French online enthusiasts gradually switched to the Internet. But before we return to the history of the Internet, we need to make one more stop on our tour of the era of fragmentation.
What else to read:
- Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (2017)
- Marie Marchand, The Minitel Saga (1988)
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Source: habr.com