Tech Time Warp: The golden age of Minitel
With all eyes on Paris thanks to the 2024 Summer Olympics, it makes sense to turn our attention to a uniquely French chapter in technology history: the Minitel. You may remember this innovation from your French language textbook, much like the TGV. If you studied abroad in France, you may have even seen one in the wild. This edition of Tech Time Warp looks at the Minitel’s historical impact.
The Minitel’s impact was far from minimal. (The Minitel’s inclusion in the “Museum of Failure” seems unfair.) By the standards of today, Minitel seems out of date, but when you consider that the French government put a small computer terminal into every French telephone subscriber’s home as early as 1983 and that by the end of the 1980s nearly every French adult had access to online banking, travel reservations, weather reports, university registration and yes, even adult entertainment, it’s rather phenomenal.
France’s early step towards a digital future
Small, beige, and unassuming, the Minitel arose from 1970s-era concerns that the French were behind in technology. In 1978, a government report by researchers Simon Nora and Alain Minc titled “The Computerization of Society” made the case for advancement in “telematics,” a term that combined “telecommunications” and “informatics.” What they described sounded a lot like the internet.
At the French president’s instruction, government engineers began developing the Minitel hardware, which was distributed for free to French Telecom users. Minitel connections began with the user dialing into the public switched telephone network. After hearing a specific audio signal, the user would place the handset back onto its cradle and then begin accessing services via the Minitel terminal. The first service was an electronic phone book, but innovation soon set in. An early Minitel service allowed Parisians to order groceries for same-day delivery. The Banque National de Paris pioneered online banking. And the infamous messageries roses or pink chatrooms were sites of flirtation and beyond.
Eventually, though, the internet went mainstream and far surpassed anything Minitel could offer, though surprisingly the final Minitels went decommissioned in 2012.
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Photo: Celso Pupo / Shutterstock
