https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
> The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980 in Saint-Malo, France (...)
> From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web.
Some here have compared the WWW to the iPhone, but the iPhone literally couldn't have existed even a few years previously. With the Web there were no meaningful barriers to it's development 20 years previously. If a more complex and clunky system had gained critical mass in it's place, that's what we might have got stuck with for a very long time.
The barrier to the web was a global network and an IP address for each node. When the network was sufficient size and people had access to ip addresses the web happened. Before that we all just used the internet.
Another big hero of mine from that era that helped invent the internet and regret the result was Wesley A. Clark.
They set the whole thing up to control it and charge extraorbitant fees for it both to the user and to anyone publishing on it. Minitel as well as WAP. Apple's 30% is peanuts compared to the fees I'm talking about - I mean contracts with minimums in millions.
Good thing Apple kicked their sand castle down. People don't give them enough credit for that.