So You Want to Be an ISP in the South of France?

(a public service FAQ)

Part 7: The FT Chronicles II

Dumb Terminals

Aside from smiling a lot, is FT useful?

Well, for one thing, it is the createur and administrateur of the Minitel, those little phone-line terminals distributed for free to all telephone subscribers who desire it. With its black-and-white 7-inch screen, desk wizard keyboard, and 1200 baud internal modem, capable of accessing tens of thousands of different online services throughout France, the Minitel was definitely a technological bijoux in the late 70's when it was first offered.

But after the early orgasm, the Minitel hasn't advanced a jot technologically for 15 years. It evolved, rather, into a 'yes-but-it's-going-to-cost-you' phenomenon that slowly but inexorably won over frenchpersonnes hearts.

How does it work? One dials a 36 xx ABCD number that connects to the ABCD server. A succession of interactive ASCII art screens file past after a proper 1200 baud pause. In a sense, it's just like the World Wide Web: if you're patient and persevering, you will probably find what you're looking for. Instead of waiting on bloated images at 28.8, you wait on monochrome equal signs and asterics.

Unlike the Web, it will cost you between 1 franc (US20¢) and 5 francs a minute as you consult, depending on the service (the average service, I think, is 2.23 francs a minute). The charges show up on your phone bill. Half of the sum goes to the server operateur and half goes to FT.

(If you are looking for ways of making money from the Web, this gives you a model of what might have been but won't.)

So, whereas Web designers try to streamline pages for quick download and try to respect the 4-clicks-to-the-gold rule, Minitel designers who want to pay the rent learn how to multiply and weigh down splash screens while burying the nuggets as far down as they dare. The client gets what he's paying for.

The most popular service is Directory Assistance, the 36 11. To be fair, if the rest of the Minitel Phenomenon even came close to the '11', Minitel could have won lots of points before it was too late. You can enter a name, a town, a department, etc. and the '11' will probably find the person's phone number. If it can't, it proposes 'fuzzy' alternatives such as alternate spellings of a last name, or neighboring geographic areas (if your original query specified a town or city). It's tidy database programming, and at 50 centimes a minute it's a bargain on the marketplace.

The ABCs of Sex

The other most popular service is the Minitel 'Rose', the collection of (you guessed it) erotic content servers. These have bewitching names like the 36 15 ULLA or 36 15 CHERI. I have no experience getting aroused watching risqué alphabetic characters limp across a small screen, but these sites rake in lots of money. I assume its adepts are in closer contact with their libidos than I am.

Other minitel servers offer all that you might expect: business news and reports, bank account consultation, travel reservations, e-commerce, etc. etc.

With 20 years to put this all together...

How could this miss?

It is too bad about the Minitel. It was an exhilarating idea 20 years ago. And there can't be much doubt that the French were the first people to taste the future of massive and coherent information sharing. That is something they can well be proud of.

But the technology was carefully nurtured into decrepitude by supply-side greed and monopoly arrogance. With the lack of alternatives and a level of intox that only a state-supported entity like FT could pull off, users were cajoled into spending 10 or 20 francs for a few minutes consultation of a static, painfully slow TV commercial without sound. How can such an entity hold its ground against an Internet that just had to turn up some day?

This is another aspect of the ISP-in-France scenario that we need to kept in mind.

On to Part 3 of the FT Chronicles.