Hacker News Reader

Comment by aphroz | Hacker News Reader

They missed the occasion to have built something global that would probably have carried European values. Probably because of a lack of communication outside french language. If I remember correctly all the parts where build in France. Later they could also have competed against YouTube, with one of the first video sharing websites, too bad they totally gave up against the US brands.

View on HN

The WWW was invented at CERN, and perhaps has academic values (linking/citing).

I don't know what European values you could mean though. Business websites that close for lunch? :)

French language might have actually got you further ahead in 40 years ago Europe than any other lang. Minitel arrived in some form or another in most European countries surrounding France. Spanish version was called Ibertexto.

English is currently overwhelming in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_in_the_Eurov...

but 40 years ago it would've been 3 dutch and 7 english to 11 french.

You'd need to explain why it would have won against the internet when AOL/MSN/CompuServe didn't.

They missed the opportunity as well, a lot did. I am not saying they would have succeeded for any specific reasons, but back then all the possibilities were there. Internet has become a nightmare, we lost everything that made it special when it started. Nowadays probably 90% of the non-porn traffic is going to Google, Amazon or Facebook and it becomes a problem for freedom of speech and "democracy". Concentration of such power or money is a problem.

Minitel was run by the French state, it doesn't get much more centralised than that! And of course far-right or Nazi messageboards would have got censored off it immediately.

(I have no idea whether there was much politics content on minitel, but I've not heard of it, and would be interested in references)

On the french Minitel a lot of discussion forums were private owned and not really censored. I think the censorship is more heavy on facebook than it was on minitel services.

Compared to the internet, the Minitel lacked infrastructure:

The Minitel was inherently Peer-To-Peer but only one peer at a time.

Sorry, I find that statement quite imprecise: you could connect to a single server at a time, just like a browser tab connects you to only one service at a time (even if it uses many libraries from many other http servers), so if you mean peer to peer this way, then yes.

But then to do that, it connected to a massive infrastructure that was there and running with very high availability constraints, ... for the time ;-)

I remember my stepdad talking about “miditel“, which would have been the name of Minitel in Belgium. Don't know if France and Belgium were supposed to be connected, if it was the same network and operating entity or some kind of white mark thing. Or just speculation.

I really doubt it would have won against the internet, but there's definitely a parallel universe in which the internet was preceded by a global (or at least pseudo-global) Minitel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com