Funny thing is that today, despite the fact that everybody has a broadband connection, Minitel is still used by some people. Specifically for the 2 usages that made its success in the first place : yellow pages and adult chat.
A few companies still make significant profit from this platform in 2011. And it's still profitable for France Telecom as well.
It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it.
We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's quite easy to find second-hand, but surely heavy to ship...)
Yes, they do. There are several billing schemes. Usually a connexion fee plus a per minute billing.
The fun part being that there was e-mail and www services accessible from the Minitel.
France Telecom internet provider, Wanadoo (now Orange) used to provide an ActiveX application to access the Minitel over IP; with the per minute usage being billed on the Internet account owner tab.
It makes me a bit sad to realize that even I remember minitel, though I grew up with the internet, and not in France -- not because I'm into tech history, but because in 2002, that's how old my high-school French textbook and its helpful cultural asides were.
Everyone hailed Minitel in the 1980s. It was touted as an example of what gov't should do (these were also the days of Japan, Inc. kicking everyone's ass, also showing what gov't "should" do for industry). Yet along came the Black Swan of the Internet to slay it. Central planning never works.
The early days of Internet were funded by the US government but not in the same way as Minitel. The French government massively subsidized the deployment of Minitel by giving away millions of terminals (in exchange for not giving the subscriber the white pages on paper) and that helped launch it.
But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it helped to kick off the wide use of smart cards, the underlying network was packet switched (X.25) and the servers handling Minitel were distributed through the network (so service providers ran their own services).
It wouldn't view Minitel as a failure, however, just because it was replaced by the web. The French were years (probably 10) ahead of the rest of the world in terms of electronic communication and commerce. They had a large internal market online in the 1980s handling a huge amount of commerce.
I may add that that after all, all the money granted for the Minitel program by the gouvernement has been recovered with taxes on Minitel minutes.
I would consider the Minitel as a success of central planning. 20 years of e-economy and quite a lot of money moving from French citizen to French corporations or smaller businesses.
But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.
Firstly, suggesting dial-up ISPs failed because they had a centralized business structure makes no sense. That's like saying horse & buggy manufacturers went out of business due to their centralized business structure rather than the introduction of the car. Also for the record AOL is still around & those companies were successful for their time.
Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.
Well perhaps your point was that those services were walled gardens & incompatible with each other before the Internet took off. The Internet opening up with it's low cost ISPs & flexibility was the end of those walled garden services & many BBSs, true.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet being centrally planned or not. It was just planned to be more open than those other services.
I know! Agencies like ARPANET, NSFNet & CERN were real drains on the Internet. All they provided was huge initial monetary outlays for building the initial backbones & tech like TCP/IP & HTTP. It also appears that the government made the choice to open the network up for commerce. So I guess these centralized agencies setting up the initial infrastructure & later opening it up when personal computers were becoming affordable was a failure?
Concepts like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server... Yes all very decentralized concepts..mmm hmmm.
What? Just because a lot of the stuff started off as government research projects doesn't mean they centrally planned the migration from what it was to what it is now.
Did Apple plan to build the iPod back in the 80s? Did Google plan that they'd build Android back in the 90s?
Just because the government didn't initially plan for the Internet to envelop our lives 30 years later, doesn't mean that it wasn't a successful centrally planned project that benefited society. Most things are centrally planned. Much of private industry relies on centralized chains of command. I am not sure what the OPs point was, but seemed more like a veiled jab that suggested centralized government programs are always failures. When the facts are that Minitel shouldn't be classified as a failure & the Internet shouldn't be classified as a poster child for decentralized initiatives.
Except the cases where central planning works, like (DUH!) Minitel (until the internet came, it didn't fail, it just got upgraded, duh), going to the Moon (distributed attempt at reaching the moon, also known as the living pyramid), justice system (as soon as you introduce the ability for appeal), the Internet, DNS system (it may be not centralized, but it is centrally planned), Google, Apple, and your own consciousness.
I can't tell if the "central planning" you refer to with respect to consciousness is supposed to be a homunculus or an intelligent designer, but either way I disagree.
Brains are pretty well distributed, and various degrees and kinds of brain damage have shown that no specific location is an inherently privileged "command center" of the brain; [different] people have continued to be thinking people without each part of it.
I agree, I actually meant "central planning" as in "your behavior is centrally planned by your brain". "Consciousness" was a pretty awkwardly chosen word, obviously.
The problem is not that central planning fails to build a certain thing (like a bridge or a road), but that it diverts resources from more productive uses. Things that are built or created are visible, but they obscure the things that might have been created otherwise. We never actually get to know the ways resources might have been allocated otherwise; and indeed these other things may be mundane and boring, yet they are the consequence of the free choices of individuals.
Of course, it can be argued that governments don't just do investments, that they can provide services that may be impossible to obtain otherwise. But when we wonder into real investment territory (like a particular bridge), we have to be able to produce a R.O.I.
What we have to consider is that the alternative uses of the capital will contribute to economic growth and in a longer timeframe, the glamorous visible things like a space program may actually pay for themselves. Not only that, these expenditures will be self-sustaining and long lasting. Or otherwise said, money spent on space (and other visible things) without a R.O.I. is actually detracting from future growth and delaying actual practical space exploration.
In central planning, the dynamics are different. Whomever influences the planners ultimately makes the decisions. The quality of those decisions depends on your perspective and the motivation of the influencers.
In a pure capitalist model, you follow the money. Whomever has money influences the decisions.
There's no right or wrong answer. Oftentimes valuable things appear as unintended consequences of government or commercial projects.
It's hard to declare the internet to not be an example of central planning -- it was built to connect Federally funded labs at universities with Federal dollars. The labs existed to provide (indirectly or directly) research to serve defense and space (which i consider to be a subset of defense) interests.
The difference between the French thing and the Internet is that key stakeholders in the government and academia saw the potential of computer networks as a driver of commerce at an opportune time. If that conclusion was made in 1978, we'd have the French thing on a terminal leased from AT&T or a baby bell.
Equating a telecom system to a railroad, bridge, road, etc from a government POV was a big leap -- but the timing was probably more important and less obvious.
More productive is subjective. There is a lot of private capital spent on inane stuff.
Also "central planning" is too broad a stroke. Are we talking about national central planning, i.e. government programs or are we also going to include central planning in corporate hierarchies, household hierarchies, software design or even things like activities directors in retirement facilities. All valid ways of describing centralized planning. Centralized planning is neither big nor small, you can have it at almost any level & it's success depends on the people involved. Which is why the vague statement made by the OP is somewhat confusing.
Central planning is how humans organize cooperation. It’s everywhere. To argue that it never works is ridiculous on its face.
Central planning probably gets harder the more humans want to cooperate and market mechanisms are very likely superior in those situations but that doesn’t mean that central planning doesn’t work.
It's not so much a success of central planning at all. The minitel succeeded not because it was beautifully planned; it succeeded because massive gov't investment put one in every home. It allowed the network effect to apply immediately.
Otherwise service providers could not have invested because there would have been no users; and there would have been no users because there would have been no services.
Note that the investment was recovered over time; but it would never have originated from private enterprise.
Today the same kind of thing could be happening with electric cars. People won't buy them until there's plugs everywhere, and plugs won't be put everywhere until most people have electric cars. Massive gov't investment could short circuit this problem in a pinch, and end foreign oil dependency.
There's no money in it for Goldmann Sachs or Halliburton, so forget about it, though.
One of many fun facts: Xavier Niel (controversial CEO of Free, disruptive French ISP) made his first $ - sorry Francs - by selling adult chat on the Minitel.
With prestel, BTX and MUPID there were quite a few prior technologies but to my knowledge, this only really took off like that in France due to substantial public funding.
Prestel in UK died and BTX in Germany/Austria was but a novelty AFAIR. I have never seen BTX being widely used here but when I was on vacation in France, sure enough even the rest stops on the highway had a few minitel terminals you could pay for. And that was around 94 or 95 when the internet has already been heard of around here in Europe and the first ISPs started popping up.
The Minitel was so entrenched long into the 90s it quite significantly hampered the original deployment of the 'net in France:
* No need to register anywhere to use it (your identity was connected to your landline)
* No maintenance or security issues
* No compatibility issues (everything was pretty low-tech, but following strict standards)
On the other hand, it had online payments, payments to sites (the national access provider charged based on access time depending on the service you connected to, and part of the money was funnelled to the service provider) and social media-based civil resistance (french university students coordinated strikes using Minitel as early as 1986). As a result the french population was not really taken aback by those capabilities in the interwebs, they were kinda used to them.
I met my first wife on Minitel (Brazil had a several Minitel networks operated by its telcos that operated from the early 80s through mid 90s). I met my second wife at a party.
It was called "videotexto". Telesp had, AFAIK, the largest install (in terms of pages and functions) but Telerj also had its own network. At that time, it was common for BBSs to support Minitel terminals connecting through 1200/75 (v.23, AFAIK) modems.
We were one of the few households in Germany that had BTX, the German equivalent of Minitel. It wasn't free but pretty affordable and had some very useful services. Since banking in Germany never heavily relied on checks everyone was already using direct bank account transfers for payments as long as I can remember, certainly in the 80s. You filled out a standard machine readable slip and dropped it off at your bank and the transfer would happen immediately.
I frequently used BTX to make payments for things I ordered and I seem to remember having a list of one-time use numbers to enter as a security measure. Must have been some kind of electronic signature.
Germany was pretty anti-technology in those days. Instead of hailing early adopters we were frequently criticized as harbingers of a cold and inhumane new world order.
There was also an attempt to introduce a Minitel system here in Ireland. It was ridiculously badly-timed; by the time it was actually up and running, things like Compuserve were around and the first ISPs were only a couple of years away.
I remember that in Italy there were a lot of minitels and what was impressive was that there were minitel pages where you could buy services, it was pretty impressive and the "chat" page was full of people. I remember I was a bit shocked when a few years later no body was using it anymore... I wonder why it failed even before the internet started to be widely used.
51 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadA few companies still make significant profit from this platform in 2011. And it's still profitable for France Telecom as well.
Low tech works :)
http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg
It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it.
We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's quite easy to find second-hand, but surely heavy to ship...)
downvote.
The fun part being that there was e-mail and www services accessible from the Minitel.
France Telecom internet provider, Wanadoo (now Orange) used to provide an ActiveX application to access the Minitel over IP; with the per minute usage being billed on the Internet account owner tab.
But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it helped to kick off the wide use of smart cards, the underlying network was packet switched (X.25) and the servers handling Minitel were distributed through the network (so service providers ran their own services).
It wouldn't view Minitel as a failure, however, just because it was replaced by the web. The French were years (probably 10) ahead of the rest of the world in terms of electronic communication and commerce. They had a large internal market online in the 1980s handling a huge amount of commerce.
I would consider the Minitel as a success of central planning. 20 years of e-economy and quite a lot of money moving from French citizen to French corporations or smaller businesses.
But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.
Which all tend to eventually fail. The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, AOL, all failed.
Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet being centrally planned or not. It was just planned to be more open than those other services.
Concepts like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server... Yes all very decentralized concepts..mmm hmmm.
Just because the government didn't initially plan for the Internet to envelop our lives 30 years later, doesn't mean that it wasn't a successful centrally planned project that benefited society. Most things are centrally planned. Much of private industry relies on centralized chains of command. I am not sure what the OPs point was, but seemed more like a veiled jab that suggested centralized government programs are always failures. When the facts are that Minitel shouldn't be classified as a failure & the Internet shouldn't be classified as a poster child for decentralized initiatives.
Central planning never works.
I can't tell if the "central planning" you refer to with respect to consciousness is supposed to be a homunculus or an intelligent designer, but either way I disagree.
Brains are pretty well distributed, and various degrees and kinds of brain damage have shown that no specific location is an inherently privileged "command center" of the brain; [different] people have continued to be thinking people without each part of it.
Of course, it can be argued that governments don't just do investments, that they can provide services that may be impossible to obtain otherwise. But when we wonder into real investment territory (like a particular bridge), we have to be able to produce a R.O.I.
What we have to consider is that the alternative uses of the capital will contribute to economic growth and in a longer timeframe, the glamorous visible things like a space program may actually pay for themselves. Not only that, these expenditures will be self-sustaining and long lasting. Or otherwise said, money spent on space (and other visible things) without a R.O.I. is actually detracting from future growth and delaying actual practical space exploration.
In central planning, the dynamics are different. Whomever influences the planners ultimately makes the decisions. The quality of those decisions depends on your perspective and the motivation of the influencers.
In a pure capitalist model, you follow the money. Whomever has money influences the decisions.
There's no right or wrong answer. Oftentimes valuable things appear as unintended consequences of government or commercial projects.
It's hard to declare the internet to not be an example of central planning -- it was built to connect Federally funded labs at universities with Federal dollars. The labs existed to provide (indirectly or directly) research to serve defense and space (which i consider to be a subset of defense) interests.
The difference between the French thing and the Internet is that key stakeholders in the government and academia saw the potential of computer networks as a driver of commerce at an opportune time. If that conclusion was made in 1978, we'd have the French thing on a terminal leased from AT&T or a baby bell.
Equating a telecom system to a railroad, bridge, road, etc from a government POV was a big leap -- but the timing was probably more important and less obvious.
Also "central planning" is too broad a stroke. Are we talking about national central planning, i.e. government programs or are we also going to include central planning in corporate hierarchies, household hierarchies, software design or even things like activities directors in retirement facilities. All valid ways of describing centralized planning. Centralized planning is neither big nor small, you can have it at almost any level & it's success depends on the people involved. Which is why the vague statement made by the OP is somewhat confusing.
Central planning probably gets harder the more humans want to cooperate and market mechanisms are very likely superior in those situations but that doesn’t mean that central planning doesn’t work.
Otherwise service providers could not have invested because there would have been no users; and there would have been no users because there would have been no services.
Note that the investment was recovered over time; but it would never have originated from private enterprise.
Today the same kind of thing could be happening with electric cars. People won't buy them until there's plugs everywhere, and plugs won't be put everywhere until most people have electric cars. Massive gov't investment could short circuit this problem in a pinch, and end foreign oil dependency.
There's no money in it for Goldmann Sachs or Halliburton, so forget about it, though.
30 years later and ISPs are trying to do this again.
Prestel in UK died and BTX in Germany/Austria was but a novelty AFAIR. I have never seen BTX being widely used here but when I was on vacation in France, sure enough even the rest stops on the highway had a few minitel terminals you could pay for. And that was around 94 or 95 when the internet has already been heard of around here in Europe and the first ISPs started popping up.
* No need to register anywhere to use it (your identity was connected to your landline)
* No maintenance or security issues
* No compatibility issues (everything was pretty low-tech, but following strict standards)
On the other hand, it had online payments, payments to sites (the national access provider charged based on access time depending on the service you connected to, and part of the money was funnelled to the service provider) and social media-based civil resistance (french university students coordinated strikes using Minitel as early as 1986). As a result the french population was not really taken aback by those capabilities in the interwebs, they were kinda used to them.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletexto#No_Brasil
I frequently used BTX to make payments for things I ordered and I seem to remember having a list of one-time use numbers to enter as a security measure. Must have been some kind of electronic signature.
Germany was pretty anti-technology in those days. Instead of hailing early adopters we were frequently criticized as harbingers of a cold and inhumane new world order.
I know the US also had some trials of teletext (text pages over broadcast TV) too, but I think that was even less successful than videotel.