Minitel refuses to die

[Bounty]

Before the Internet, the French had minitel:



A simple terminal hooked up to a phone line, capable of retrieving information from databases, with simple online shopping and message board functions. It was the best that could be done with 1982 technology, quite advanced for its time, but hopelessly outmoded the day 56k showed up.

So it's a bit of a surprise that, 27 years later, the decision has been made to keep the network running for the foreseeable future due to "high use":

Plans to end directory assistance by the French precursor of the internet, minitel, have been shelved because it is still widely used. The minitel is a French video-text technology introduced in 1982. It could be used to book tickets, check stock prices and look up phone numbers and addresses. Today, the 3611 directory assistance is its main service, and is still accessed over a million times each month.

"If we end this service abruptly in March, as we planned, it’s likely that we would still have over a million connections a month, which is a lot,” Michel Datchary, CEO of PagesJaunes, the company that runs the directory service, told the AFP news agency.

The 3611 service was accessed over 19 million times in 2008.

France Telecom and PagesJaunes had announced in July that they would stop offering the 3611 directory service in March 2009, because it was losing 50 per cent of its users each year.

Minitel was launched with great hopes of a high-tech revolution and the post office gave terminals free to anyone who wanted one. But it has been eclipsed by the internet and ending the directory service would signal its impending death.

Those who still use minitel today are not very web-savvy, according to Datchary, and may never start using the internet. It’s a “pretty loyal group”, he said.

Kudos to them for keeping this running; I suppose they can just wait another year or two for that loyal clientèle to just die of natural causes.

That said... I know there have been all sorts of attempts to bring internet to people who would otherwise never consider it. Minitel struck a winning formula, so perhaps lessons can still be learned from it.

[Akkleptos]

That said... I know there have been all sorts of attempts to bring internet to people who would otherwise never consider it. Minitel struck a winning formula, so perhaps lessons can still be learned from it.

Indeed. I think it was a marvelous invention. The idea is essentially the same as the internet, or at the very least like those online services such as Compuserve or PeopleLink. Hell, the internet itself in the early nineties was arguably not as useful and versatile for the average citizen as this Minitel service probably was in the early eighties, except for the international reach of the former (something -I'm wildly guessing- French customers wanting to find local information probably didn't care for much).

Besides, if it still has a sizeable market (from the company's POV) and if it still serves its purpose with decent efficiency (from the user's POV), there is no reason at all to discontinue it. In the face of these reasons, the fact that the technology might be severely outmoded is irrelevant.

Also, I can only assume the cost was and still is much less than that of an internet connection. Which brings another matter to mind: has anyone ever attempted to come up with a way for it to connect to some basic internet services, such as Usenet, Telnet, et cæetera?

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