End of an Ear: Minitel Goes Dark

This is the end of an era and a great vision.  I knew a few people who trialed these devices in Canada as part of the Alex initiative.

France has never had a public library system as robust as North America. On the other hand their telephone system answered questions beyond the usual 411 stuff.

“The last 800,000 Minitel terminals in France will go dark this month, as the service is finally shut down. Minitel was a proprietary network service that used “free” dumb terminals to access online services, typically at a small fee for each use. Minitel was much loved by business because every use generated revenue for them, and by its users, especially when it was the only game in town.

But it’s also an existence proof of the power of open systems. Minitel boasts 1,800 services up and running. Imagine if the Web boasted a whopping 1,800 websites — like the “500-channel cable universe,” the numbers that seemed like an unbelievable banquet of choice in the 1980s now seem like a farcically constrained menu, the digital equivalent of the half-dozen standard clothing styles in a Soviet department store.”

Minitel Goes Dark

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/15/minitel-goes-dark.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

This was in the pre-internet and web era and was magic at the time!  It’s actually an classic example of how a great idea and vision can be overtaken by technology, time, and events.

Stephen