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Comment by KeitIG | Hacker News Reader

One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats).

It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today with Internet.

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Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all. Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually numbers would have been far less than that.

Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC 'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape drives to accompany them.

Edit: Number formatting.

I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.

I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998.

I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).

Speaking about erotic services it might be funny for Anglo-Saxons to know there was a (serious) dating service named 3615 CUM.

Of course they used the latin word "cum" that means "with" ...

They had giant advertising posters all over France, and I am sure quite a few English speaking visitors must had wondered about French mores :-)

I remember traveling through France and seeing these enormous billboards. It was not simply that the word CUM was emblazoned upon them but the imagery was quite "sexy". So yes it was quite surprising to see contrasting it to my rural Irish background...

as a kid I remember vividly two uses:

- online phone book - video games magazine services for news, tips and most importantly prize winning contest (with no luck)

we all knew about the online erotic chat (lots of public billboard with explicit enough colors to get the message across) but for some reason neither I nor my friends ever got interested in trying them. Oh maybe they were pay before use anyway... that would have interesting consequences when your parents review the phone bill afterwards.

I'm curious: are there any books or movies which feature use of Minitel?

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