French Moonshot: Minitel Launches the World Into Cyberspace

By: Richard Burry

From the perspective of the 1980s, the Internet-centric world that we all now live in was hard to imagine

The World Wide Web would be invented at the tail end of the decade, with public access opened up in 1991. Those who followed technology closely knew that something revolutionary was coming, but the larger society still thought of a global village connected by servers and networks as something improbably futuristic.

Pundits had a good laugh when the French government unveiled “Minitel,” its attempt to get ahead of the tech curve in 1982. The Médium interactif par numérisation d’information téléphonique was France’s moonshot, a strategy to leapfrog global rivals with a system that would wire the nation, long before online connectivity was cool.

The impetus of the program was the surprisingly poor state of the French telephone system. It was so bad in the 1960s that only six in ten French households had a phone, compared with 78 percent in East Germany, the nation whose greatest technological feats are remembered as the inventions of the Trabant and the perfectly-named Wartburg.

Based on this, it seemed logical to entrust the Minitel project to the national telephone and postal agency. The government began distributing Mintel terminals for free, ultimately giving away 9 million of the plastic units, which stylistically resembled an Apple II, circa 1976.

In many ways Minitel presaged the rollout and early development of the World Wide Web. Along with the good came some familiar negatives. In 1985 the entire system crashed, overwhelmed by millions of French dallying in messageries roses, adult chat rooms.

Minitel ofcially came to an end in 2012, but even today there are some in France who cannot leave those glory days behind. Late in the evening, as television channels segue from the nal Jerry Lewis movie to the triumphant playing of La Marseillaise, a remnant of computer hobbyists dust off their Minitel terminals, and relive the grandeur of an earlier time

As a university student in the 1980s, I shared this same sense that something important was being born in the realm of technology; even though my experiences until then hadn’t prepared me for this new world.

At the age of 18, I was working in oil elds and on construction sites, and later volunteered to join the Canadian Coast Guard. But by 1984 my growing interest in technology prompted me to enroll in university to study data processing and its application to accounting and nancial systems. The computers of the time were mainframes, and the communication medium was a stack of punch cards, typed out manually on terminals.

Upon graduation, I began my career in technology by working with PC systems, programming functions such as accounting, inventory, merchandising, AR/AP, scheduling and bar coding. I rose through the ranks of a large cable company to become a systems analyst, a PC department head and IT manager.

I enjoyed the dynamic pace of technology so much that in my free time I founded a computer BBS that connected users around the world who wanted to share les and play games. You might say it was my small-scale version of Minitel.

As the World Wide Web began attracting interest and generating excitement, I realized this was a watershed moment. It seemed clear that this technology would change the world, and I soon founded my rst Internet-based company.

My partnership with a credit card processing business put my company at the leading edge of Internet innovation. At the time, this was new technology, and it proved to be vital to the growth of e-commerce

We are far removed from those early days, but I still like to view the promise of technology with the same kind of anticipation and imagination that I felt as a student in the 1980s; and with the same spirit that must have inspired a Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones computer engineer working on the Minitel initiative.

Not all moonshots reach the moon, but they all point our imaginations skyward.