[BRIEF NOTE] What Wikipedia has to say on Minitel

[rfmcdonald]

Recently, I was reading up on France's Minitel videotext network (official site, English-language Wikipedia, French-language wikipedia). Launched on a mass ascale on the early 1980s, the Minitel videotex network with its dumb terminals and smart servers with on to become so successful (if unexpectedly so) as to count as a great marketing success, surviving if diminished to this day despite the Internet's technical superiority. The Minitel is one of those great what-ifs about global telecommunications, the network that might well have repalced the World Wide Web if only France had been able to find markets for its technological export. Thinking along these lines, I was more than usually taken aback when I came across this in the English-language Wikipedia page on Minitel.

In 1994, a journalist looking for Pauline Réage, the author of the Story of O, found that she was commonly known as Dominique Aury, the name under which she worked as an editor at a major publishing house, Gallimard, and had published several "respectable" books. Aury was not in the white pages, but she was listed in the Minitel directory. The journalist called her and learned that she had found the right Dominique Aury. "Dominique Aury" is also a pseudonym as her real name is Anne Desclos.

Oh, ever agglutinative Wikipedia. What won't you come up with?