Minitel: How France Built an Online World a Decade Before the Web

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In 1985, while most American computers sat disconnected on desks, millions of French households were already online, buying train tickets, checking bank balances, playing games, and chatting with strangers. The network was Minitel, and it grew out of a crisis. In the late 1970s France had fewer than 7 million telephone lines for 47 million people, and the national telecom authority, the PTT, was spending 500 million francs a year on printed phone books and directory operators.

This episode explains the solution: an electronic directory, reached through a small terminal that the PTT loaned to households for free. That giveaway solved the chicken and egg problem of platforms and gave developers an instant audience. The story then follows what users really did with it, the billing trick that made thousands of services profitable, why Britain, Germany, and the United States failed to copy it, and how its own profits slowed France's move to the internet.

The term telematics, coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc, described the merger of telecommunications and computing that the government set out to build.
By 1985 games and messaging made up nearly half of all traffic, and adult chat lines known as messageries roses were often staffed by men posing as women.
Under the kiosk model, dialing 3615 added charges to the phone bill with no itemization, and service providers kept about two thirds of the hourly fee.
The terminal downloaded at 1200 bits per second and uploaded at 75, a deliberate compromise because people read faster than they type.
Minitel returned over a billion US dollars in 1998 and was not shut down until June 30, 2012.

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