Your quote prompted me to read the Minitel wikipedia entry, and apparently there was still 10 million monthly connections on it in 2009. Unfortunately it was retired in 2012; would have been interesting to see how it would fare today.
Ironically, the French time format is best in my opinion, because some operating systems and services can’t handle colons in file names. ISO 8601 allows for Thhmmss.sss which can be represented in filenames, but I’d rather use something like 20h33m02.345 because it’s much easier to read at a glance than T203302.345, which looks like one decimal number.
It appeals to me as an EE (by training) too. I've occasionally slipped a '£2k3' or similar and had to explain...
protocol and metadata in HAL follows OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiative - Protocol Metadata Harvesting
With a very long list of institutions following the same standard.
They simply have a compatibility layer with OAI-PMH it's disingenuous to present the list of Open Archives Initiative participants as somehow being related to the HAL project.