French early BBS/Internet

[spitfiremkv]

It is(or was) called Minitel.Anybody used that? what was it good for?

[hawker238]

I thought that was a digitalized phone book?  More like a news source, phone list, and other such pieces of info.

[spitfiremkv]

kinda like text services on TV?

[hawker238]

Originally posted by spitfiremkv
kinda like text services on TV?

To the best of my knowledge.  I don't think had the same capacity as a BBS or the normal internet, but hey, I'm just referring to my 10 year old french book.  I'm sure straffo knows.

[SFRT - Frenchy]

It was a phone book.

You could access "websites".

You had various services such as "online resevations for stuff" or "informations like "movie times".

You could chat with people.

It was black and white screens, it could play some primitive little animations.

[Dinger]

yeah, I used it. It was a dumb terminal with something like a 1200 down/110 up baud.... Later ones were in color. Basically, it was a little box with a tiny screen you plugged into the phone. There were a series of telephone exchanges dedicated to the Minitel (3615, 3612, the whole 36xx series probably). You'd type in "3615 SNCF" for example, and it would connect you to the national railway timetable and reservation system.

3615 ULLA was for men and women looking to get laid. My gf at the time had a friend who used that, and from her description, he got some pretty impressive  scores.

I used it predominantly for train schedules, airport information and occasionally as a phone book

As of 5 years ago, Minitels were still around.

[beet1e]

Originally posted by spitfiremkv
It is(or was) called Minitel.Anybody used that? what was it good for?

Yep, I've used Minitel in my private flying days, during which I often flew to France. You could use it for filing flight plans, checking NOTAMs and getting weather reports TAF/METAR etc. Minitel wasn't restricted to aviation, as I found out when I entered an invalid code and got a list of cinema screenings in Lyons - lol.

But it was a bit of a pig to use. The instructions would be in French only, and my French wasn't at a good enough level to understand the details. IIRC, you put the phone receiver into an acoustic coupler, dialled, entered a logon, saw the information coming up on the screen which was about 15cm square.

The American equivalent of doing that is probably the DUAT system.

[Spooky]

That POS minitel thingy caused a 10 year delay in Internet development here: it was ahead of its time in the 80's, but it dragged forever into the 90's, with full government support ...

it was a nice source of pr0n back in the days
it is still used as phone directory (free), for train timetables and stuff like that , but it is definitely being phased out ...

porn is much better on the web now !