Comment by slau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slau | Hacker News Reader

A company I worked for used to host Minitel services. In particular, it was a system to handle driving test allotments, reservations and cancellations between the government ("Préfecture") and the driving schools.

The service was provided for free to the government, the company organised free training sessions for government clerks, and it was the driving schools who paid for the service when dialling into our minitel servers.

It technically wasn't a monopoly, because the driving schools could still go down to the préfecture, and do everything using the forms/pen/paper.

The company tried on a number of occasions to get the driving schools to move from the Minitel service to the new web version. Every single time, there was a huge push-back from the driving school unions, about how expensive the new service was, and how "unusable" the website was, compared to the Minitel.

We even had people calling in, saying that we were extortionists. "We've been using this for over 20 years, and never paid a cent; now you want us to pay xx€ a month?" I guess some of them really didn't look at their phone bill.

I heard about 4 or 5 "planned terminations" of the Minitel service during my stint from 2010 to 2015. France Telecom/Orange even provides a "Minitel over IP" service these days, where a website can be enrolled into their payment service, and users pay per minute on the website. It's a superb scam tool (just have a hidden iframe open a pay-as-you-go page), and Orange is constantly fighting the fraudsters.

Talking about migrations, I worked at two places (tax office, and large store) that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every time it was a disaster. I was much enamored by the old system that was hyper efficient, both at the low level (zero bandwidth, fixed layout) and at higher level too, all that wasn't spent on visuals and gimmicks was used for "smart" features, semantic suggestions, math auto correct on the fly. Also almost no learning phase. Sad.

> that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every time it was a disaster.

Usually the first service is build in an Agile manner. It starts small, and more and more features are added as years pass by. Then some one decides to create a complete new system from scratch, and they never realize all the hidden complexity that exists in the original solution. So this second waterfall project fails and needs years to become usable.

Happened something like that in this case? :)

Can't say, I wasn't working on this, I just witnessed it.

My best guess is that nobody wanted to maintain the old so IT decided to surrender to the latest enterprise fad.

I can understand this. I keep seeing examples of people cherishing the largely keyboard operated ANSI/ASCII interfaces because once they had the navigation keys internalized, they could operate them largely without looking.

And frankly HN regulars should not be surprised. Just look at the continued love for tiling window managers and terminals for development work. Never mind the "minimalism" of HN itself, largely consisting of text.

In the same vein, the Nokia 32/3310 could be navigated easily without looking. There were four buttons, a pair of arrows, ok, and cancel. A real, pure touch interface provided you could memorize the button sequences.

Later models with 4 directions and spatial menus were a step backwards in terms of usability IMO. I always had to look to ensure I hadn't accidentally clicked a corner and moved in diagonal.

Best i recall, the full dpad and such came because of J2ME requirements. the specs for that expected at minimum two soft buttons and a dpad.

Full productivity on dumbphones was realized when you learned you could hit 1 to activate the first item in a menu, 2 for the second etc. 5-2-3 boom new text message

Not to mention writing a text while driving, all without taking your eyes off the road...

Not failing to mention how handy that 'Menu-523' came in handy when the dpad wore down(usually the first keys to fail on a feature-phone). It kept me from having to buy a new phone for months.

This reminds me of the coin operated ice machines that the luddities would pay instead of their ice delivery guy (ignorant of the fact the machine was running on their electricity)

Technicaly it would be like rent but I wouldn't be surprised if some paid for the machine several times

Many virtual terminals still default to the 80 character lines of punchcards. The new contains or emulates the old.

It's in the name: Terminal Emulator

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