On 11 Jul 2005 12:57:29 -0700, "Chris Sprague" > said:

] Was TeleTex the same thing as MiniTel, or was it a predecessor?
]

Chris,

Minitel is the terminal, TeleTex is what it displays -- a sort of protocol,
I imagine. The whole thing is referred to as "the minitel" and still
exists.

[Max wrote]

] to "ARPA Internet" -- 1980 or so -- that's when the famous name began.) But
] in those days, the French national "TeleTex" initiative promised
] text-over-phone in homes, with special terminals; a bold independent project
] with, I believe, France telecom as a major operator. This no doubt

It remains to be said, though, that the minitel
was a brilliant invention, largely diffused, and solved many problems
of fully distributed web-based commerce. Most importantly, because
it is based on a kiosque system (all billing centralized through FT) there
was never any security problem for payment. And of course FT made
bushels of francs!

Now, I don't wax nostalgic for the minitel (I don't even have one any more)
but since the terminals were free it had a huge penetration. We used it
-- dragging us kicking and screaming back on topic -- in the early 90s
to order wine delivered to the appartment, bought train tickets, consulted
movie schedules etc; all well before the web existed.

I believe it is thanks to the minitel that the French are currently so far
behind at using web commerce. They already had something that worked
pretty well, so they had no compelling reason to switch.

-E
--
Emery Davis
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