Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web

France is switching off its groundbreaking Minitel service which brought online banking, travel reservations, and porn to millions of users in the 1980s. But then came the worldwide web. Minitel has been slowly dying and the plug will be pulled on Saturday. Many years ago, long before the birth of the web, there was a time when France was the happening-est place in the digital universe. What the TGV was to train travel, the Pompidou Centre to art, and the Ariane project to rocketry, in the early 1980s the Minitel was to the world of telecommunications. Thanks to this wondrous beige monitor attached to the telephone, while the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank manager or queueing for tickets at the station, the French were already shopping and travelling “online”. (via BBC News - Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web)

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