If you paid a visit to France in the 1980s the chances are you’d have been surprised to see a little brown screen and keyboard sitting next to the telephones wherever you went. At the time, it was ...

Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond ...

Long before there was the iPhone, users in France had another connected device with which they could do everything from check movie listings or the weather to chatting with other users or booking ...

In 1991, most Americans had not yet heard of the internet. But all of France was online, buying, selling, gaming, and chatting, thanks to a ubiquitous little box that connected to the telephone. It ...

This essay is divided in two main parts. In the first one, the history of French telematic is briefly exposed. Its protagonist, the «Minitel» terminal, is today present in a great number of French ...

Before there was AOL, Amazon, Groupon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! or any of today’s other Internet titans, there was the Minitel: the boxy little terminal that allowed French clients to access a wide ...

PARIS -- In October 2000, France Telecom ran its most expensive publicity campaign ever for a technology considered cutting-edge when Ronald Reagan was in the White House and Pac-Man and Asteroids ...

France pulls the plug on the Minitel this weekend, a home — grown precursor of the Internet which brought on — line banking, travel reservations and even sex chats to millions a decade before the ...

After 30 years of service, France’s Minitel information service is shutting down for good. Launched in 1982 by the French state telephone company Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications (PTT), which ...