A Minitel Terminal. Click for full size and resolution.
Summary
Today we’re going to talk a bit about alternate Internets. In previous episodes, we have outlined how, going back to the 1970s and 80s, early experiments with networked computing and online services began using a technology called Videotex. So, I wanted to dig deeper into these experiments to look at them as valuable precursors to the world wide web and the modern Internet. It is unlikely, for various technical reasons, that videotex could have evolved systems that could have challenged the modern TCP/IP internet as we know it, but it’s fun to explore these other systems and imagine an alternative net that might have developed. And most interestingly, to me at least, this exercise will allow us to examine Minitel, the French Videotex network that grew to prominence a full decade before the World Wide Web.
Special thanks to Laurent Bristiel @LaurentBristiel for his research assistance on this episode.
The New York Times on the death of the Minitel
This is the Reply All episode about working for a Minitel Rose service
I’m glad there’s more context to the idea of ‘online communications’ here. Hopefully you do/have done an episode on the inventors behind the scenes at Bell Labs, Xerox and IBM of human interfacing and connectivity that preceded everything. A lot of really interesting stuff has been made public by Bell Labs and members of Xerox PARC 60’s and 70’s alumni have continuously trickled a lot of aspects of ARPANET they were involved with as well as technologies we still use today that originated with those research groups and academics.
And of course, you should never leave out The Mother of All Demos… 🙂
Thanks for taking time out to document something that seems to be so commercial most days so as to avoid any real critical analysis and documentation. Good work.