[BRIEF NOTE] On the end of the Minitel

Jul. 3rd, 2012 11:33 pm
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This image, featured in the Les Échos article "France Télécom a débranché son Minitel" ("France Telecom Has Unplugged Its Minitel") by Solveig Godeluck, shows the growth in usage of the pioneering French Minitel network from 1984 through to its formal shutdown at the end of the 31st of June, 2012.

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It's certain that the small vintage console, with its brown buttons and giant pixels, left a big impact on society. Minitel, with its entire ecosystem (applications, payments platform, built-in network) inspired the U.S. Vice President Al Gore when he delivered his famous speech on the "Information Superhighway" in the 1990s. The French experience did not escape NTT Docomo, the Japanese mobile operator who invented the iMode, and even Apple with iTunes. Steve Jobs had in fact his own Minitel, given to him by the Frenchman Jean-Louis Gassée.

Jean-Paul Maury, "Mr. Minitel" of the Directorate General of Telecommunications (ancestor of France Télécom), said that France was "well ahead" in computer systems in the 1980s: "The display of colors in JPEG format was invented in France for the Minitel. Similarly, our power supply inspired the USB of today." Jean-Paul Maury fights against the idea that the Minitel delayed the changeover to the Internet in France: "Instead, it gave us an advance of twenty years. At one point we were the only ones with an electronic directory, banking, information in real time when France Info didn't exist! " The father of Minitel concedes that the country lost its lead, first, because the United States capitalized on their vast domestic market to conquer the world with their PCs. These worked everywhere, while each European country built its own standard of Minitel.

Then, in France the liberalization of telecoms terminated the plans for public investment. "From the outset, we planned to distribute 30 million Minitel terminals," said Jean-Paul Maury. At the time, France Telecom was connecting 2 million homes per year to phone lines, for 5000 to 6000 francs each. He was not underestimating the cost of adding Minitel connections: "The terminal costing 1000 francs was included in the CHF 100 billion plan to catch up the phone! "

In thirty years, the centralized system which counted up to 25 million users brought in billions of euros. France Telecom says modestly that "tens of millions of euros" were earned in 2011 for the hundreds of businesses still using the platform, and "several million" for the telecom operator itself.


The Twitter hashtag #ripminitel carries links to various people's reactions to the end of the platform.
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[BRIEF NOTE] On the netbook

May. 20th, 2009 06:55 pm
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If I read Wired more frequently, I might have come across Clive Thompson's article in the February issue, "The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time" before now. In it, he writes about how the netbook--a relatively low-powered portable computer that, instead of computing everything itself, instead sources everything to Internet-based programs--is radically altering the computer market. It all started with an attempt by one woman to come up with a cheap portable computer suitable for purchase in poor country.

The miserly constraints spurred [Mary Lou Jepson] to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory—the type in your USB thumb drive—because it draws very little juice and doesn't break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft's wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn't very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you're reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.

To build the laptop, dubbed the XO-1, One Laptop per Child hired the Taiwanese firm Quanta. It's hardly a household name, but Quanta is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world. Odds are that parts of the machine on your desk, whether it's from Apple, Dell, or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta—possibly even designed by Quanta. Like most Taiwanese computermakers, it employs some of the sharpest engineers on the planet. They solved many of Jepsen's most daunting engineering challenges, and by 2007, the OLPC was shaping up. The poor kids of the world would have their notebook—if not quite for $100, for not a whole lot more.

Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek—Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.

What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.


Thompson suggests that, because of their cost and their high degree of functionality, and because future netbook computer users won't necessarily need to or want to use high-powered software like Photoshop, netbook computers are the wave of the future, as opposed to unnecessarily powerful computers like--say--the Toshiba Satellite laptop that I'm using to type this entry.

This interests me greatly, not only because of what it says about the future of computing--networks of relatively low-powered terminals connected to a high-powered Internet--but because of its strong similarities to the first mass computer network. I refer, of course, to the Minitel, a French computer network active from the early 1980s with millions of subscribers, a network that made use of dumb terminals connected to strong servers. I used the Minitel model myself for a global computer network in an alternate history that I wrote some years back, the Euronet. It's nice to be vindicated, much too late for the Minitel, perhaps, but not too late for myself. I like being a good futurist, or whatever you call what I did back then.
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[BRIEF NOTE] What Wikipedia has to say on Minitel

Mar. 13th, 2008 12:59 pm
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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?
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