Минитель: Французская онлайн-служба до Интернета

French videotex service

The Minitel was a videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was invented in Cesson Sévigné, near Rennes, Brittany, France. The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980 in Saint Malo, France, and from autumn 1980 in other areas. It was introduced commercially throughout France in 1982 by the PTT (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones; divided since 1991 between France Télécom and La Poste). From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, information services for business, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web. In February 2009, France Télécom indicated the Minitel network still had 10 million monthly connections. France Télécom retired the service on 30 June 2012.

Officially TELETEL, the name Minitel is abbreviated from the French title of Médium interactif par numérisation d'information téléphonique (Interactive medium for digitized information by telephone).

The most popular service of the Minitel was the "Annuaire Electronique"; in 1985 about half of the calls on the network were to it. In May of that year a white pages directory for all 24 million telephone subscribers nationwide became available. It was accessible through the phone number 11; on 18 October 1996 (when the new French numbering system was adopted), the access to the phone directory changed to 3611. Companies could add up to 3 lines of complementary information and a "prehistoric" website. Ads to the Minitel phone directory were sold by ODA (Office d'Annonces), today Solocal / Pages Jaunes Groupe in Sèvres France. In 1991, the "Minitel Website" for the Paris Sony Stores contained already over 100 pages. Today the 3611 Minitel Directory is replaced by the online white or yellow pages. On 11 February 2009, France Télécom and PagesJaunes announced that they were to cancel plans to end the Minitel service in March 2009. Its directory assistance service was still being accessed over a million times a month. This was before France Télécom retired the service on 30 June 2012, on account of operational cost and fewer customers due to lack of interest.

Minitel used computer terminals consisting of a text only monochrome screen, a keyboard and a modem, packaged into a single tabletop unit. Minitel terminals could display rudimentary graphics using a set of predefined block graphics characters. Color units were later available for a fee, but remained seldom used. Aftermarket printers were available. Minitel used the existing Transpac network. When connecting, the Minitel's integrated modem generally dialed a short code number connecting to a PAVI (Point d'Accès VIdéotexte, "videotext access point") from the subscriber's analog telephone line. The PAVI in turn connected digitally via Transpac to the destination servers of the appropriate company or administration. Popularity of the service caused a two week service interruption for its users, in June 1985, after an increase of connection establishments per second had revealed that a dormant software bug had to be corrected. In France the most common dial number was "3615", while "3617" was used by more expensive services. Minitel services names were often prefixed with this number to identify them as such. Billboard ads at the time often consisted of nothing more than an image, a company name, and a "3615" number; the fact that a Minitel service was being advertised was then clear by implication, similarly to the use of ". com" for later web services. A notable example was in the title of the film 3615 code Père Noël, in which a child attempts to use a Minitel to call Santa Claus, only for the call to go to a local criminal; the Hollywood film Home Alone was accused of plagiarising its plot. Minitel used a full duplex data transmission via its modem. It downlinked at 1200 bit/s (9 KB/min) and uplinked at 75 bit/s (0.6 KB/min). This allowed fast downloads, for the time. The system, which came to be known as "1275" was more correctly known as V.23. This system had been developed for general purpose data communications, but was most commonly used for Minitel and equivalent services around the world. Technically, Minitel refers to the terminals, while the network is known as Télétel. Minitel terminals use the AZERTY keyboard most commonly used in France (as opposed to the QWERTY keyboard more common in the English speaking world). Some early models used an ABCDEF keyboard layout instead.

The extent to which Minitel enhanced or hindered the development of the Internet in France is widely debated. On the one hand, it included more than a thousand services, some of which predicted common applications on the modern Internet. Alternatively, the French government's attachment to the natively developed Minitel may have slowed the adoption of the Internet in France; in the 1990s there was a peak of nine million terminals and there were still 810,000 terminals in the country in 2012.

Belgium: Minitel was launched by Belgacom and delivered services led by Teleroute. Although it was used by businesses, it was rarely used by the public. The main reason was that the terminals were not offered for free as in France and that usage of the service was expensive (50 Euro cents a minute). Moreover, there was never much promotion thereof by Belgacom. Brazil: Telebrás had a videotex service called "Videotexto" or "VTX" during the 1980s and 1990s with services provided by local telephone companies such as Telesp (now part of Telefônica Vivo). Services included chats, games, telephone list search, and electronic banking, among others. The Minitel protocol is still used by some cable TV companies to provide general information to their customers. Canada: Bell Canada experimented with a Minitel like system known as Alex with terminals called AlexTel. The system was conceptually similar to Minitel, but used the Canadian NAPLPS protocols and North American Bell System RJ 11 standard telephone connectors. Originally launched experimentally in the Montreal area, Alex was then launched in most areas served by Bell Canada (primarily Ontario and Quebec) with offers of a free trial period and terminal. The principal information offering was the telephone directory. Although branded as a "bilingual" (English and French Canadian) service, the majority of other services offered were the experimental ones originally offered in Quebec and completely Francophone. Retention rates were reportedly close to zero. The service closed down shortly after exiting the experimental stage. Telidon was an earlier Canadian text and graphics service using the same technological underpinnings. Finland: In 1986, PTL Tele, then Sonera (now part of Telia Company) launched the on line service called TeleSampo. TeleSampo included not only videotex services, but also many other Ascii based Value Added Services (VAS). Roughly at the same time, HPY HTF (now Elisa) launched a videotex service called Infotel (fi). TeleSampo service was switched off in 2004. Germany: "Bildschirmtext" (BTX) that existed between 1983 and 2001 is almost as old as Minitel and technically very similar, but it was largely unsuccessful because consumers had to buy expensive decoders to use it. The German postal service held a monopoly on the decoders that prevented competition and lower prices. Few people bought the boxes, so there was little incentive for companies to post content, which in turn did nothing to further box sales. When the monopoly was loosened, it was too late because PC based online services had started to appear. Some post offices in Germany offered BTX boxes for public use, allowing access to BTX without owning a box. Sweden: Swedish state owned telephone company Televerket (now Telia Company) introduced a similar service, called Teleguide (sv), in 1991. Teleguide was shut down in 1993 due to a contract dispute between Televerket and the vendors IBM and Esselte. United Kingdom: The Prestel system was similar in concept to Minitel, using dedicated terminals or software on personal computers to access the network. The number of Prestel subscribers only reached 90 thousand. In the early 1990s US West (subsequently Qwest and now Lumen Technologies) launched a Minitel service in the Minneapolis and Omaha markets called "CommunityLink". This joint venture of US West and France Télécom provided Minitel content to IBM PC, Commodore 64 and Apple II owners using a Minitel emulating software application over a dialup modem. Many of the individual services were the same as or similar to those offered by France Télécom to the French market; in fact, some chat services linked up with France Télécom's network in France. The service was fairly short lived as competing offerings from providers like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe as well as independent bulletin board systems and internet service providers offered more services targeted at American users for a lower price. Many of US West's Minitel offerings were charged à la carte or hourly while competitors offered monthly all inclusive pricing and many smaller BBSes were completely free of charge as long as users called a local number. Minitel also offered services directly in the US with a DOS based client that was sent out to customers for use with an IBM PC compatible. In 1983, the publishing company Knight Ridder and AT&T offered a competing service called Viewtron. The service offered news, aviation schedules and educative content, but no way of mail communication, as the publishing company thought communication should be one way only.