Minitel: France’s Alternate Internet That Survived Until 2012 

This definitely exceeds the half is interesting threshold

You don't see it represented in media much, but France in the 1980s had this quite futuristic vibe. Minitel, TGVs, Smart Cards while the rest of the world was using mag stripes, with a backdrop of shiny modern buildings like La Défense, and the Pompidou centre, all powered by France's massive commitment to nuclear power.

Being French, I remember very well my 70 yo grandmother ordering stuff and booking train tickets in the 1980's all by herself! And when the Internet and WWW came in the mid 1990's, France was the last developped country to be Online : the adds were like "with the Internet, you'll soon be able to book tickets from your home or send messages, etc." and most French people would think "It has been 15 years I can do this with the Minitel without having to buy an expensive computer I'll never use anyway".

I used Minitel back in the day on trips to France. It was genuinely handy. France has a long history of coming up with something neat then invoking Not Invented Here to ignore other developments.

To this day French people who've been talking about themselves will still end with a depreacting "3615 My Life", the French 80s equivalent of "thanks for coming to my TED talk" 😂

I am french and I actually STILL have a Minitel on my shelf! I remember the times using it… Ah the good ol' days, snif…

Could you please make a video on the story of Vulcan, West Virginia and how in the 70s the Soviet Union and East Germany nearly built a bridge there? It started off as the small village wanted a bridge that crossed the Tug Fork river, since they used to have a foot bridge that collapsed, and when both West Virginia, Kentucky and the federal government ignored them, the local mayor asked the Soviet embassy and East German officials to help build a bridge: the Soviets even sent a journalist there, and West Virginia immediatly promised and built a bridge so that the Soviets won't build one. It's a pretty intersting story, and it was major news at the time.

The frame of text at 2:18: "Did you notice that LEMONDE is spelled almost exactly like lemonade? I couldn't figure out a concise joke about that but I spent like a half hour trying to figure one out. Ah well, scripts don't go out because they're done, they go out because they're due. C'est la vie. Let me know in the comments if you can figure out what the joke should have been. Also hey, look at you, pausing the video to read this. Thanks for helping my algorithmic performance."

There were networks like this around the world back then, but only in France did it get really popular.

That was actually quite innovative, and the concept hasnt died out at all. You still can call a number with a phone, to get it connected, and as well, the payment goes over your Phone Bill. Theoretically, it should be possible to buy a train ticket when a company would offer it. Just not via a computer with a keyboard and a program, but with a phone via a call or a SMS.

The day before Minitel definitely stopped working, my dad unearthed our old terminal from the basement and plugged it in. It still worked like a charm ! A lot of services weren't available anymore, but we could still consult the phonebook and the weather, for exemple. It was a really fun evening, full of nostalgia for my parents and those of us children old enough to remember them using it, and full of discovery for my youngest siblings.

As an Australian, I'm experiencing a crushing sense of irony after watching this video. The French government anticipated the social and economic value of the internet _in the 1970s_ and brought Minitel into being. An Australian government with no concept of the real value of the internet _in the 2010s_ brought the NBN into being, with already obsolete technology and some of the slowest broadband speeds in the developed world. Plot twist: the main flaws of Minitel and NBN are both due to pandering to newspaper barons.

In the UK, there was Prestel which was a similar service, run by British Telecom, employing teletext style text / graphics and dialing up to a centralised Prestel server. Elsewhere there were vatious private Bulletin Board Systems you could dial into around the world. Nothing quite as expansive, popular and long lasting as Minitel of course.

A few things from an insider. ( I've been working in Telecoms for 20+ years now ) Minitel was already a zombie by 2012. ( understand : nobody except those that still had a terminal or a modem and knew of a number to connect to beyond 3615 ( that was already dead ) used it ). 2012 was the year the underlying TRANSPAC X.25 network was officially shutdown ( officiously it wasn't shutdown for several years after that date due to special customers ). What mainly killed the Minitel was the advent of ADSL, and the push to deploy it all over France... Why bother with a 2400bauds ( with a Minitel 2 ) monochrome, Text based screen when you can have it on your brand new PC with a 512K/64K ( or more ) ADSL link. Now what needs to be understood about the Minitel is that French people could do almost everything that can be done nowadays : book train/plane tickets, book hotel rooms, check bank accounts, look for a job, read news, chat, send mails, ... And since it was free ( except the 3615 cost tied to the service used after calling 3615 [ and many 'general services' were free on 3615 ] ) it was way cheaper than all the ISPs connections ( before ADSL ) and the early Web. Last, at that point in time France was one of the lead country when it came to telecom research and standard. The CNET ( Centre National d'Etude des Télécommunications ) was recognized worldwide as the French equivalent of the Bell Labs, and many ITU telecom protocol standards evolved from French protocols. But in the end, yeah, The minitel rocked... At my parent home it was standing near the Amstrad PC1512 ( even if we never tried to us the Minitel as a modem for the PC... which was something it could do ), and in my early working days I spent hours booking train tickets ( and in some cases hotel rooms ) and filling reports to a private Minitel server for work.

My parents still call internet the minitel lol It is also the source of great memes in France

I think Minitel worked becuase it was mostly a text-based system, which has a relatively low overhead for data transfers. Minitel was finally rendered obsolete (in my opinion) when surfing on the Internet became reasonably fast by 2011, even before 4G LTE became widely available.

I'm French, and it was pretty interesting as a kid reading my uncles' old teen magazines and seeing a bunch of ads for 3615 video games and such. Also my grandfather, a former librarian, kept using his terminal all the way to the end to access public library catalogues; the switch to using the Internet was pretty rough for him.

“The traditional French presidents role of having affairs while balding.” Legend

Minitel prepared french families for the Internet. Two examples : When I was a kid, my older siblings had to file their inscription to University on the Minitel. When I finished highschool myself, University simply switched the inscription process from minitel to internet, and it worked perfectly. To find phone numbers, we used the phonebook service on the minitel (3615 pagesblanches) - when Internet arrived we immediatly switched to the website. The minitel created a "digital reflex". The real reason Internet took time to take off is the monopoly of France Telecom. Once FT (who was privatized and became Orange) lost its monopoly, communication prices litteraly plummeted (at those times, you spent for the phone 40€/month on subscription fees AND paid time fees for communications, even local ones and 30€/month for a RTC based internet line - when private sector came in, we started to pay 19€/month for a "triple play" subscription including illimited ADSL internet access, illimited phone, and cable TV!). Most French families immediatly went from no Internet to ADSL. Very few people knew RTC modems in their lives.

One serious omission is that the very first service, 3611, was also the most popular and free: the French phone book lookup!

10 million monthly connections in 2009? I've never ever heard anyone using the minitel since the mid 90s, so that's quite a surprise honestly.

I remember hearing about the Minitel in a college communications course in the 80s. Our instructor told us that the French, being the French, mostly used the mail/chat functions for assignations and sexting, and I thought, I don’t think that has anything to do with being French-that’s a stupid stereotype. A few years later, as the World Wide Web arrived in all its glory, I noticed how much time and industry people were using for online dating, conducting affairs, looking at porn, etc., here in supposedly Puritanical America.

Surely Minitel is at least 70% as interesting. It's sort of more BBS than web, but pretty cool, and it's a shame most attempts to build similar failed to varying degrees from sort of (Prestel, UK) to brutally (BTX, Germany) :D

Ah, Minitel, that’s a name I haven’t heard in forever. I’m pretty sure that was how we got to download compressed to hell and back ringtones and wallpapers on our Nokia brick telephones back in the day, too.

Today I learned that the machine I thought was just another very old computer in my childhood was actually an alternate version of the internet I currently am on

I wonder if there's anything out there that allows TCP/IP packets to carry minitel data, allowing terminals to work over a modern internet connection. I'm sure a bunch of retro computer nerds would be interested.

I always watch two of these videos back to back to get a full serving of "interesting".

Minitel sounds like a 1984 ministry, so it's pretty funny that it failed for being too centralized

My wife used Minitel for me to check out what documents I needed for the French driver licences. Interesting, the had a web emulator to interact with it. I though it a clear and easy way to find the list of items you needed.

In Finland we had similar dial-up services, TeleSampo and Infotel. (Though, our phone company wasn't nice enough to give people free terminals! You needed to get your own computer and a modem! I did see public Minitel terminals when I was on vacation in Paris and found them rad as hell.) My first way of accessing the Internet was through Freenet, which was a service for school students, and you got there via these services. I remember my father accessing the banking services via TeleSampo as well. (I remember him complaining about the 2-factor authentication, which was done as a list of one-use number pairs. Funny thing, when I signed up for my own Internet bank access, the bank still used the same system... and continues to do so to this day, technically, though now they also use a phone app as an authenticator.)

Valérie Giscard D'estaing went to top French engineering school : Polytechnique. He was very curious about tech in general and knew who to listen to. A rare quality among politicians.

1:19 minor nitpick: This is the new 2019 AFNOR AZERTY layout, that nobody uses, and was, for sure, not used back when the minitels existed, due to, well… being from 2019…

I remember a French musician who, during a stupid interview, was asked "what is your favorite military event in history" and he replied "the Minitel bill I left my garrison when I was doing my service there".

This is very well explained, I've never seen a French video talking about this this precisely and quickly, well done!

3:56 "they use Euros now" this really got me hahahhaa

So if I understand correctly, the World Wide Web is now public for 29 years old (1993, exists for 33 if you count the invention in 1989), while Minitel existed for 34 years in total (1978-2012). So the Minitel is for now still longer lasting than the Internet.

Last time I was this early, Minitel still existed

3:15 If it's followed up by an ablativus. More often than not it actually means "when"

Like in many other countries at the time the German Postservice had a similar idea. Basically a beefed up Teletext which worked via the phone line. You could get a device, connect it to your TV and off you go.

Some of the main lasting use of Minitel was due to the safe centralized system you could use to make card payments proper Chips and Pin one’s All seconde génération terminal had a card reader built in

In Italy we where tring to do something also similar to the internet 🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹 It was caller "OSIRIDE", as the egyptian God, and It would have been based on the ISO/OSI protocol, which at the time was tring to do a lot of the same thing that internet would have done with the protocols ICP/IP, but not with a "best effot" connection like on the internet, but with a varety of type of connections that the user could have choosen. So theoretically someone could have asked for a minimum ensured stable connection and word on that. But at the end we became connected to the American internet connection through satellite, and the project died :/

There is actually a lot of really interesting history from the early age of internet and networking (note that i say just internet, not the Internet) Like, how it wouldn't have been impossible to have ended up in a world where europe and north america had an entirely different internet (TCP/IP in North America, probably some version of OSI in Europe) but as you can probably tell this didn't happen, TCP/IP while a bit funky was good enough and already working so it spread before others got a foothold anywhere so OSI just fell through But there are actually a handful of alternate internet's that were developed and theoretically could have existed at scale and taken off existing entirely independently of the web on its own technology stack But in the end we just got the Web, and just one internet, which probably is for the best (could you imagine not being able to just load some random site from the other side of the internet for no reason without a bridge) But i honestly *really* wanna see the alternate worlds where other internet protocols made it before the web could spread, i really wanna see the alternate realities that could have existed for the internet(s) Like I really wanna explore the other internets that could have existed, i wanna know what would have happened if 2 incompatible internets got too big for one to be phased out But alas I'll never know (and the implications of actually being able to find out would be far more terrifying and far reaching than woah alternate history, the ability to view into other realities would have massive implications for everything)

In Canada, Bell Canada (the phone monopoly serving Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec) put out AlexTel terminals, dumb terminals with a slow 1200 bps speed that was rapidly outclassed in the early 1990s. They charged a monthly rental and some services were expensive per minute. Bell Canada discontinued it in 1994.

I still have the interface I made (quite easily) to connect a Minitel terminal to the RS232 port of a computer. In my case, I used an Atari 520ST and the ZZ-Com software. It allowed to display pages in colors (although the servers generated color videotext pages, the Minitel terminal has a monochrome display) and to record pages in order to read them offline later (useful because each minute of connection was charged).

Minitel would have fit in perfectly with the other institutions, Miniluv, Minipax, and Minitrue.

This video unlocked some core memories about using the French in Action textbook/videos in college and having Mireille show Robert the Minitel in her house.

My dad used to fall asleep in front of his minitel when using the 3615 Ulla. He stopped that when my grandma received a bill of 15 000 francs at the end of the month (~2000$). Fortunately she was working at the PTT.

Sam, if I end up buying a Nebula subscription it'll be because of you. You're funny and informative. I can listen to you talk all day.

I haven't literally LOL'd at an HAI video for a long time, but the "How can we use this to be aggressively horny" line had me spitting coffee.

"...an extremely cracked iPhone using your neighbor's internet connection." The man knows his audience!

I remember going on an exchange trip to France back in 2001 and the French family I stayed with had a Minitel in their house. I thought it was a bit odd but also intrigued by it. I assumed it was kind of like a standalone computerised phone book or something with its own old-looking green-text on black screen cathode ray tube monitor. Even back in 2001 though, phone books were still a thing and it wasn't culturally ingrained even then to just google phone numbers on the internet - so back then I did think it was kind of useful and pretty interesting.

I've used Minitel! It was available at all La Poste offices & most public libraries!

A lot of countries had these to be honest; Prestel in the UK is a bit older than Minitel although didn't last as long and had nowhere near the penetration although BBS was fairly popular among us nerds even after the internet was established.

1:51 The video might get checked by YT

I did a report on Mini-tel in college in 2005. It was amazing. It was beautiful. It was a throwaway joke in Archer.

Also, for a while, France Telecom (the successor of PTT) made it so that you would be able to access Minitel with standard computers the same way you'd use Internet at the time, by plugging it into the landline

My favorite video of y’all’s in a while ❤

I was literally just thinking “what if someone just made their own internet?” and then I saw this video

I don't understand how these people decide what Stock footage they should use for their videos. Their creativity is astounding!

For anyone wondering I’m pretty sure 6,000,000,000 Francs is about 980 million US Dollars.

1i remember hearing about minitel in France back in the 80's. It seemed like a nationalized version of Quantum Link, which later morphed into America Online. Prodigy and Compuserve were similar services before the world wide web was available to consumers. I thought the concept of minitel was interesting because it had been adopted nationwide. I did not know France's telecom provider was state owned at the time, but it makes sense to me now. In the 1980s, most of my online presence was through local bulletin boards, which provided a very different experience to actually being on a network. I wonder if any of minitel's innovations became part of the internet we use today?

I remember reading about this in my french class in high school in the late 80s

I read the title as “surprisingly successful internet competition”

Shoutout to Julien Mailland, the world’s expert on Minitel

Great video as always! Was wondering when you’d mention the underground cinderblock rings going on using the network. Maybe saving it for your video on cinderblocks? Cinderblock video please

I remember this very well, I used to look up the guide to the first Tomb Raider games on the Minitel

Wow, I never heard of this! Great video!

Some of the best jokes you’ve had in this video. Love other videos but you had me laughing really hard

You should add that channel you mentioned in the beginning to the list of related channels on your page, I went there looking for it earlier and thought maybe it wasn't out yet.

Look, you keep pushing Nebula, and while I have it, renewal doesn't seem likely to me. One, despite the reasoning being too make videos without worrying about the algorithm, besides the modern conflict series, basically everything in there doesn't seem unfriendly to youtube. Two, there's very few actual exclusives, with one of my favorites, Technorama, being something that could have been on RU-vid anyway. Meaning, since I'm patient I am only really signing up for the few exclusives. While the HAI and related channels do try to fill it up, frankly only you, Tom Scott, and Tech Altar really try. There's so much wasted potential on there that it is hard to justify. Three, the Curiosity Stream bundle sounds good, but Curiosity Stream is even more disappointing. It's a worse national geographic, which I already have, and I have found only 1 good documentry on there, which, surprise, surprise, was done by Veritasium. The Butterfly Effect in particular was painfully bad, as it took a good premise and botched it badly. Like, I have issues with Alternate History Hub being way too vague at times and even then he does a better job than what that did. Why tease the audience with alternate possibilities and then not even show them? 4, double watching. So, because most of the time it is just early access, it makes me not want to watch it on RU-vid if I do watch it there since I already watched it. Which means my own algorithm is messed up since I'm watching fewer videos here and so on. Yes, it is cheap, but it seems more of a waste to me than anything and it needs to improve.

I did not expect to be reminded of 3615ULLA by an English speaker today

As a French, 3615 something brings back so many memories

I LOVE a Flawless new live action travel competition channel! I really hope you make it internationally next time! Imagine it within the EU…CRAZY!

Makes me wish Ma Bell, then the Baby Bells did this. Part of your phone subscription goes towards a BBS that the local Baby Bell runs and from there fido into other servers that central server takes rent from for the potential added traffic (like, ten bucks a month from the server for the listing.) That would've honestly been pretty neat.

I remember connecting in middle school. There is a node in Québec. I think it was in Montreal. It was cool at the time. We exchanged messages with other students in France.

"To put that into perspective, today, 6 million francs could buy you nothing." Bruh lmfao

At some point, I even had the portable/foldable version on our Minitel. They're quite scarce. I do wish I'd kept mine, really...

Minitel had a distinct advantage over internet: payment and account. All purchase was billed on telephone bill. No credit card needed. No separate account registration except minitel account. No separate id, password for each online shopping mall or service. All store and transaction was secure, tracked and protected by phone company.

My French Exchange students family had one.

There were lots of closed, curated networks back in the 90s which were alternatives to the generally open "world wide web" that we know and use today. AOL (America Online) is one such example. In the early days of AOL, they didn't even bundle it with a web browser, you could only access their curated set of services, served up by their own servers. I wouldn't necessarily call that an internet alternative, but it was certainly an alternative to the world wide web.

Nice video, that brought back some memories of using it in the 90's, and then we got some free AOL CDs and that was the beginning of the end for Minitel 😄

When life gives you lemons, the French make Lemonde-nade

I love that the nebula advertisement at the end still shows the same Gravity Falls video after all these years

I can still remember the ads on radio saying to go to 3615-*"name of the radio station"*

Pepe Le Pewdiepie is the best pun you’ve ever made, and that says a lot

One quibble is that I wouldn't really refer to it as a competitor or alternative to the Internet. That's an obvious framing in retrospect. But in 1978 when the idea was picking up steam, the Internet was an obscure thing with zero applicability to end users at home. Minitel had hardware in use by 1980, and commercial wide release by 1982. Arpanet wasn't even upgraded to IPv4 until 1983, five years later. At that point the Internet was still wildly obscure, but 1983 is basically the "birthday" of the modern Internet because that's as far back as you can trace any real backwards compatibility. Commercial dial up service wasn't available until 1989, so that's the first time it really crossed any sort of overlap with Minitel as a service for general home users.

My mom had a Minitel in SF back in the early 90's. She may have seemed like a silly hippie artist. But she was always trying out new tech and was the goto old lady for other old ladies with tech problems. I think she mostly used hers for recipes and astrology.

Today's fact: Both Nicholas Cage and Michael Jackson shared the same wife, Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.

The the TCP/IP model of nowadays Internet is based on the work of Hubert Zimmermann and Louis Pouzin, designer of the CYCLADES network.

Reminds me of when I paid $6.00/hr for Compuserve access back in the '80s. Lightning fast 300 baud modem connected to my TRS-80. Those were the days!!

I found a minitel computer at my job last year, abandoned, a beautiful piece of art. I work in public services so it makes sense we still have those antics here

The quality of the research on this is astounding

hilarious and informative! thanks!

Great video.

I'm guessing this worked like 'dial-up' modems. So when someone was using Minitel it tied up the phone line, and no one else in the house could use the landline. Of course before 2000 not many had mobile phones, so after that it seems less important that you couldn't make or receive calls. As with so many advances in tech - and this certainly was one - it doesn't actually pay to be first out of the blocks, because others will take your tech and adapt and standardise it, and make it cheaper to use and innovate.

The terminal were not totally free. They replaced the paper phone-books the PTT had to provide free of charge to any customer asking for it. Once you received a Minitel you could not ask for he paper version of the phone-book but there was a free of charge online service available by dialing 36 14. You could also use a computer and a regular modem since there were Minitel emulated terminals for many systems of that era. I had one on my Amiga 1200.

4:25 I'm litterally watching this on an android with a cracked screen connected to an internet wifi router that I didn't set on my own...

We had Beltel in South Africa Beltel was discontinued in the early to mid ninties

Remember this from the old textbooks from my high school French class

Its illegal how interesting this is