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I had a Minitel account in the 1980s. France Telecom rolled out Minitel in the US, although almost nobody noticed. Minitel had much of the functionality of the Web in a primitive form. There were online stores which accepted credit cards. Traffic maps of Paris. News and chat. Phone directories. Text porn. Social and dating sites. (One had to be able to write good poetry in French to get noticed.) Even paid sex chat ("tenderness service"). Most of the functionality of the Web was there, except images and video.

Minitel was a pay service; almost everything cost. The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much and that bandwidth would become so cheap.

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> The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much

Another huge surprise was that people would create so much content (including really good content) for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge, in hundreds of languages, thousands of times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica, that was created by random people and experts around the world almost entirely without payment.

Of course I'm talking about Wikipedia above, but that's just one of thousands of outstanding Web resources that people created for free.

I can just imagine the people's reactions 15 years ago: Why would anyone do that for free? Wouldn't the government shut it down? Who would pay to run the servers? Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage. You might get a few random people to write, but no subject-matter expert is going to waste their time.

> Another huge surprise was that people would create so much good content for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge..

This wasn't too much of a leap for me. Microsoft Encarta shifted its information from CDs to the internet. And when you think about the whole premise of the internet, it was a tool for researches to share information. Remember all the university hosted sites packed with information? Now give all these people an easier place to publish their information while also reaching a wider audience.

One of my favorite pages from this era is probably this tide chart by someone at University of Nevada, Reno:

http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.htm...

And Stanford CS guys publishing their outdoor excursions:

http://theory.stanford.edu/~rvg/arroyo/

I think for people in the free software community it was a bit more obvious. Before the internet became ubiquitous we already had random professionals creating world class software for free. For me, the biggest surprise is actually the opposite. I'm amazed at how well the music industry has managed to maintain a grasp on the popular music industry even though the tools to create and distribute music are essentially free. Although, I think it can't last to be honest. Already I watch more Youtube than TV and I don't think I'm alone (though admittedly I don't watch much of either).

> Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge

Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'all human knowledge'. It's probably a good primer for the type of information that consitutes such knowledge but it's barely skin-deep.

Even the British Library, for all its faults, holds magnitudes more information; it adds three million items every year, which is half as many as Wikipedia has total articles.

Words, surely; information, I'm not as sure about. I would wonder how much content an entire library truly holds if you were to try to abridge all its books together into one tome with every redundant statement stripped out, such that each fact or idea was only elucidated once, in one way.

I can pick a couple of mathematics books off my shelf, where less than 5% of their content is on wikipedia -- wikipedia is good for topics which many people understand, but in my experience gets very bad for more difficult topics. This partly makes sense, they are difficult to write about, and difficult to read without being an expert so is wikipedia even the right place?

In my perfect fantasy world Wikipedia articles would be so well-written that as you delved further into a niche field, they seamlessly segue into textbook chapters.

The problem with this is the way that Wikipedia is moderated. You get moderators who take it upon themselves to be God of a section and don't let anything through that doesn't meet with their views. There are many anecdotes scattered around the internet of experts with first hand knowledge of a topic and they can't get their expertise included because some moderator or group of moderators think they know better and censor the information from ever seeing the light of day.

> Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage.

I think you would need to clarify to the person that there are just as many volunteer editors as there are volunteer writers. And then, perhaps, take them through a thought-experiment where fifty people are, in parallel, handed a copy of something and asked to mark it up for spelling and grammar errors. Even if they're all amateurs, the union of their annotations is likely to asymptotically approach (or even exceed) the results of a professional editor. Copyediting is actually uniquely suited for this sort of thing; it's, as they say, an embarrassingly parallel problem.

(Structural and content editing not-so-much, and Wikipedia indeed has deficits in those areas.)

Growing up in France in the late eighties, I once read an article in the gaming magazine Joystick that piqued my interest to no end. It was all about the wonderful world of téléchargement -- downloading -- through the Minitel.

Once I finally got my hands on the serial cable needed to connect the family's Minitel to my first computer, an Amstrad CPC6128, I was in business... As if by magic, a new game had teleported through the telephone network, materializing on a previously blank floppy disk. My 9-year old mind was well and truly blown! This was 1989 and I had just downloaded a game.

Never mind that the transfer took an eternity, resulting in a hefty charge to my parents' phone bill. Never mind that I had very little interest in the game itself -- it was only Bubble Bobble, after all. No, the downloading process is what fascinated me. A whole new world of possibilities had just opened up.

But a year later I was crestfallen: we had moved to the United States and there was no Minitel. Perhaps fortuitously, there were no Amstrad computers either. The complete lack of Amstrad software stateside was solid ground for requesting a new computer. Now armed with a brand new 286 PC and a 2400 baud modem, the Minitel was soon forgotten as I discovered the joys of local BBSes, inevitably ending up running a rather popular one of my own.

America may not have had the Minitel, but it more than made up for it with a thriving BBS scene, fostered by those gloriously free local phone calls.

Note, however, that charges (or lack thereof) for local phone calls varied greatly by region. Major cities like New York or Chicago had "message units," and a customer would get X message units free per month, depending on the service plan. In general, a local call was one unit, while calls further out within the metro area would be billed several units at the beginning and one per minute afterward. In some cases, unlimited plans were available at a hefty price.

Other areas, like Atlanta, had unlimited calling over a wide area, while rural areas often only offered toll-free calling within town, or perhaps to one or two nearby towns.

I miss the local BBS scene of that era, but I don't miss the hassle of analog modems, long-distance charges, and (by today's standards) laughably slow speeds. Even a low-end smartphone is light-years ahead of 1980s tech.

Amazingly, FidoNet is still a thing, though many of its systems are now on the internet instead of analog modems. It might come in handy again if the internet apocalypse happens.

The funny thing was that in the US, there was Minitel. But you had to get a terminal, or a PC emulator for one. France Telecom deployed dial-in ports in most US cities. It was popular with French expatriates, because there was no extra charge to reach services in France.

There was a failed attempt by a Silicon Valley company, "101 Online", to deploy Minitel terminals in the US. The terminals were available in electronics surplus stores for years.

That's an interesting tidbit of Minitel lore that I did not know about until today, thanks!

But I'm afraid that even in the DC metro area, among French embassy personnel no less, few people knew about such a thing. We certainly didn't. Most French folks who missed the Minitel just ended up subscribing to one of the major online services of the time, namely CompuServe and Prodigy.

Besides, without the benefit of those giant billboards featuring topless young ladies[1] the Minitel never stood a chance in the US.

[1] Was it 3615 ULLA? ;)

> We certainly didn't. Most French folks who missed the Minitel just ended up subscribing to one of the major online services of the time, namely CompuServe and Prodigy.

People might not realise just how eye-wateringly expensive these services were.

In 1988 Compuserve charged $11 per hour. (Very roughly, that's $22 today).

I'm not sure what Prodigy charged, but it's amazing how much people used to spend on very slow online connectivity.

http://imgur.com/a/zdoZj

I remember there were almost no visitors from France on my websites, back in 2000. Many were still on Minitel. From Wikipedia: "In 2005, there were 351 million calls for 18.5 million hours of connection, generating €206 million of revenue, of which €145 million were redistributed to 2,000 service providers (these numbers were declining at around 30% per year). There were still six million terminals owned by France Télécom,". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

I read that Germany had something similar called BTX from Bundespost, but that died a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext

Minitel has been kept on life support for many many years for a very specific service: Teleroute, a european freight exchange. Since about 2003, a website existed but French small transporters were very, very slow to move to the web.

As it was a pay as you go, it was a cash machine for FT/orange (and marginally for Teleroute) we had to keep the minitel infrastructure alive and in sync with the website and rest apis. Mixing state of the art webservices and decade old infrastructure was a nice challenge.

The thing we dread the most: having to change graphical elements in videotex format.

It was the same in the UK Prestel (our equivalent of minitel) was kept going for travel agents long after the main service died

I used to have a minitel in my collection of oddball terminals when I worked for BT

I had a GENIE (iirc: General Electric Network Information Exchange) account in the DC area of the US in the 1980s. It was similar- email, and online 'Mall', and so on.

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