Dear readers, there is an interesting topic hidden in the previous article about the decline of German as a prestigious language.
... and Realists Learn to Shoot
One day, I will certainly write a post about jokes and humor in Central Europe. Coming from a nation that Reinhard Heydrich himself called lachende Bestien, I’d be a bad blogger if I never ever touched that topic. If there is one thing that authoritarian regimes really loathe, it is being laughed at, even behind closed doors; and every secret police out…
It is not really a Central European topic, sorry. Yet it is also a topic for the nerds who came of age around the turn of the century, and so I’ll risk a jaunt out of the space between the Elbe and the Danube and dedicate one article to it.
In that other article, I wrote that the early Internet felt very Anglophone. In the case of Germany, that might have been simply caused by their technological conservatism. But as far as France went, the reason was different. The French weren’t very visible on the early Internet, because they had their own Internet. Sorta, kinda. Its name was Minitel and it was a network with very French characteristics.
Minitel came to be in 1980, so quite early in the digital age. Unlike the American-born Internet, which was originally a military research project intended to create a resilient computer network (Arpanet), French Minitel was a civilian project of the government-owned French Telecom1. Its rollout was remarkably quick, from a pilot project in rural Brittany (the first city to enjoy the service, Saint-Malo, was a quaint port town of 45 thousand) to a nationwide network inaugurated in 1982. At its beginning, Minitel offered a digitized phonebook and little else, but other functions soon followed, such as weather forecasts, banking, various university-related activities for the young and also crude electronic chats.
When the French government really wants to do something, it can rely on a formidable state capacity, and a Minitel terminal soon landed on the desks of millions of French people and businesses: 9 million terminals in total, with 25 million regular users. It is probably safe to say that France of the 1980s was the most connected nation in the world.
It was also isolated. The French have a knack for creating technical solutions incompatible with the rest of the world2 and the Minitel could absolutely not “reach out and touch you” if you were located in perfidious Albion or haughty America or the barbaric wildlands to the east of Strasbourg. It wasn’t even compatible with basic e-mail service that everyone else in the world was adopting to, and that was the “killer app” of the very early Internet. Sending e-mails across half of the globe in minutes was precisely the thing that people of the 1980s and 1990s were willing to invest in and pay for. And Minitel was not designed to do that.
For some time - three decades, actually - Minitel was a competitor to the Internet in France, and its initial dominance probably delayed the adoption of the actual Internet by the French population. The Internet was always present in the academic sphere, where the researchers needed to communicate with the outside world, but its spread into the general population lagged. Funnily enough, and unexpected by the original planners, one development on the Minitel mirrored that on the wider Internet quite closely: it was full of erotic chats. (Given how micromanaged the service was, they were concentrated in a specific channel, of course.) But the French, never particularly prudish, did not complain.
The Minitel was ultimately killed by the same thing that created it: government overreach and control. The French government bought the devices and decided what services would be available to the users; there was no real drive to modernize, nor to actually respond to the demands from below. The overwhelming majority of the terminals remained black-and-white until the early 2010s, when color output was the norm everywhere else. The devices themselves were free (égalité!), but the access was paid per minute. That was expected (after all the provider was French Telecom, used to charging the callers by the minute in all other contexts), but also pretty much the inverse of the market situation that elsewhere enabled the Internet to expand; by the early 2000s, this business model was clearly becoming anachronistic. Given that the French newspapers complained about potential competition, they gained a privileged position on the network by law. And a late-1980s attempt to expand the service to Ireland failed miserably. Without the government support behind it, Minitel just could not compete with the market solutions provided by the rest of the world.
Still, it took a lot of time for the French government to actually pull the plug on Minitel. The service went offline in 2012, approximately on par with the global phasing-out of the telegram.
Ultimately, the Minitel saga is a story of a top-down vs. bottom-up approach, where the former can make some impressive leaps, but has a hard time not ossifying soon after.
Minitel is worth remembering, especially in the context of the discussions of digital sovereignty that now grip the EU. As an IT person, I would welcome a form of digital sovereignty based on the aggregated wisdom of the open-source movement. But I am afraid that the bureaucrats will be naturally attracted to some yet-another micromanaged proprietary solution that could well be called Minitel 2.0. Let us hope it does not end like this.
The extent of AI use in this article: 16 grammatical errors and bad word choices corrected. Three factual mistakes corrected. No editing.
Back then, it was the DGT/PTT, as the name France Télécom only stems from 1988. Same institution, different names.
Such as the SECAM TV standard, the Radiocom 2000 analog mobile network, or allocating radio frequencies in a way that made deployment of early Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices in France a headache. Bluetooth 1.0 contained a hard-wired channel exception for France, and operation of a standard 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network in France was severely limited by French military needs. Wi-Fis whose signals could be caught outside a private building required special permits. When this regulation was finally lifted, it was lifted département by département, so for some time, your daring outdoorsy Wi-Fi would be legal in one village and illegal in the next one.
I had actually never heard about Minitel before reading this article! Thanks for that bit of education :-)
Also on a side note, could you place the footnote references after punctuation ("French Telecom.1" instead of "French Telecom1.")? It just looks awfully strange and non-standard in English :-)