Minitel

From Telematique to Minitel

The creation of Minitel began in 1975, after it was determined that only 60 percent of French homes had telephones, a situation that critic Howard Rheingold called “nearly a third world state of telecommunications.” To remedy this, President Giscard d'Estaing commissioned Simon Nora and Alain Minc to issue a report on how to bring France into the technology age. The visionary Nora-Minc study recommended a program called Telematique, which would merge computers and communications technologies for France. The Telematique program involved supplying volunteers with free computer terminals, keyboards, and jacks that fit into telephone wiring slots, to be placed in their homes and businesses. To fund this effort, the researchers recommended that paper telephone directories be abandoned, and instead published on the free computer system.

A Minitel terminal from 1989. (Owen Franken/CORBIS)

By 1981, the government was ready to implement Minitel, a teletext system that ran on the donated terminals. As part of its promotional campaign, the first three minutes of a directory search on Minitel were free of charge, and for years the French press ran stories of estranged families reunited through the magic of the new technology. Directories weren't the only thing to be found on Minitel; the service quickly expanded to include (for a fee) weather reports, bank statements, stock-exchange information, and clothes shopping. A decade before the arrival of the Web, universities began to use Minitel to coordinate student registration, course delivery, and examination results.

Out of all of Minitel's 20,000 different services, its messageries, the system's chat services, are the most popular. Minitel chats differ from other sorts of online chats in important ways, notes linguistics [Page 317]expert Anna Livia. Because the average per-minute cost of the messagerie is about $0.38 U.S., brevity becomes an important consideration. In addition, because Minitel exchanges typically take place under conditions of pseudonymity (users are not allowed to list phone numbers or addresses in their bylines), users often wind up inventing masquerade-like identities for themselves. Pseudonymity is certainly important to users of the messageries roses, the name given to Minitel's adult-sex chat lines. Although conservatives have called them “electronic urinals,” a 1991 Harris poll showed that 89 percent of French citizens had no problems with the messageries roses, and thought they should remain on Minitel.

The Price of Success

Minitel was not the first teletext system to find its way to Europe (the British had launched their Prestel system years prior), but as a method for getting shopkeepers, students, farmers, and housewives “wired,” it was certainly the most successful. Some would say that is was too successful. By the late 1990s, Minitel claimed 15 million users, compared to only 12 million French users on the Web. Many French people prefer Minitel to the Web because the former requires no software to load and no hardware to configure. As Rheingold puts it, “It's no mystery why modem dial-up services for PC users in Paris did not grow explosively, when the government was handing out free terminals (with built-in modems) by the millions.”

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