A little piece of ICT history will take a bow next month, when Orange finally pulls the plug on Minitel support in the face of Internet-driven falling usage:
Minitel, the network that put France at the forefront of the IT revolution, is slated to go dark. According to Le Monde, a spokesperson for Orange, the France Telecom subsidiary that has been managing the network, said that the service will shut down at the end of June 2012. “Even though Minitel still sells,” the spokesperson said, “its usage and traffic are falling. It is heading for its natural death.” Minitel worked through small, custom terminals that were leased to the users, initially for free, and connected via the telephone line. Usage however was billed by the minute.
The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was launched in France in 1982 by the PTT… From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet.
Minitel was a full-fledged web precursor. It had retail services, applications, bulletin boards, and so on. An ecosystem developed around the technology in the same way that the early web spawned a wave of startups and – as with the early web – most of those companies collapsed in a bubble.
One place Minitel differed from the web was in the French government’s approach to Minitel’s adult services. In a pitch-perfect enactment of national stereotypes, Paris took a lax attitude toward the possibility of children stumbling into adult content. Instead of lending credence to the kind of moral “have you seen what’s online” panics that grip American political life, French politicians told parents that it’s their own job to monitor their own children. What the French government did do, however, was tax the hell out of online pornography. Of course they did.
Zizek also talks about Minitel in the context of his “coffee without caffeine, cigarettes without nicotine” example. There’s a subtle difference with Minitel cybering that he unpacks in this 1992 interview, right before veering into an analogy about electrons that’s… unfortunate.
Photo:
* Rama [Wiki Commons]
References:
* France Telecom to Shut Down a Beloved Precursor of the Web [Scientific American]
* Minitel [Wiki]
* Hidden Prohibitions and the Pleasure Principle Slavoj Zizek and Josefina Ayerza. First published in Flash Art March/April 1992. [EGS]
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