I still love France in many ways and speak French fluently, but I’ll still pick on them  whenever it is convenient. =)

Don’t worry, I pick on everyone – Americans too.

Except the British. I’ve lived in London, and England is the summation of all that is good in the world. =)

In that vein, why can’t the French just keep Minitel for another 15 years? Acquaintances of mine have parents and grandparents (I’m 41) who still use this and wish it’s not being scrapped.

 Anyway – there is something called Eldy that is promising – and kinda sorta fits the description of the terminal you describe, only it has a GUI and etcetera and runs on top of popular operating systems.

http://www.eldy.eu/  

For the record – I am not involved with Eldy – I only dinked around with it for a few hours a couple of years ago when deciding on what sort of system an elder relative of a friend might use – we decided to get her a new computer and classes at the senior center, which worked splendidly.But Eldy seemed pretty viable for the right situation.

BTW – the elder in question  (82 at the time) – an American – would have been quite happy with Minitel for her needs ;)   — but she’s happier using the new machine and the lessons we gently um…made her attend were the catalyst for her becoming pretty adept with the computer and a power user of various video and graphic programs.

The web isn’t much different from liquid gopherspace, eh?

(Actually, it sounds like the state governments of Alaska, Wyoming, Vermont, and the Dakotas.)

Just look up the numbers. Even in 1996 only a fifth of Americans had access to the Internet.

You could still get more out of Usenet than the Web until about 1994 and still order books via telnet from I think books.com

Ah yes, books.com. Just checked, back n 1995 I maintained a list of sources of for English language sf and books.com was still on it. A couple of websitestoo, of course.

Even given that though – it does seem amazing that Minitel was kept running into 2012.

Not every history has to be told in terms of winners and losers. There was never any question of Minitel competing with the WWW. It was overtaken by something even more awesome, but it predated it by a long way. And the term “exceptionalism” is really badly chosen — what should the French have done? NOT invent something because it would be replaced, ultimately, by something invented nearly 10 years later?

Classic Bronson Pinchot spot hawking Videotel in Houston
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpLUVVEIUE

Disclaimer – Back in the 80s, a different part of the company I worked for made the computers that powered Minitel.  They weren’t very effective for most of the things we hoped we’d be able to sell them for, in spite of how the Powerpoint slides looked like they’d be perfect for air traffic control systems, but if you needed thousands of serial ports running low-speed cooked-mode text, they actually were really good at it. 

Honestly  I’d have thought Minitel would have integrated itself into a French-National social network and expand, using national sentiment and an air of familiarity to get the oldsters to slowly consider setting up shop online.I mean c’mon, how hard could it be to write something that connects through the net but presents the familiar interface yet have some improvements rolled out as time progressed (to the point where you could just use it on a browser, or have a browser version and a ‘minitel client’ version…. then again that’d probably be hard to pull. Probably harder to tax. I dunno.

The CEO of the company saw the wind turn and want ahed full on on monetizing on Internet access with free (0 EUR) service until it launched its broadband ISP / Telco, and now cheap cell service.

And as a previous poster said, you could develop a Minitel service easily with open and documented protocols. You could run one on an Apple ][ or IBM PC/AT.

The thing with Minitel is that unlike BBSes, there was a big bureaucracy backing it up so it was kept on life support long after the BBSes were all gone. 

Some people here would like to complete a Bingo, you see.

I remember my parents using Minitel in 1989 for transit directions in Paris – though with obviously less graphical prettiness, the quality of the search and directions was right up there with what Google maps just achieved in the past few years.