I loved Daysha’s post RE: reading the paper on a computer, circa 1981. It just so happens that the French rolled a similar system into production in the early 80s, called the Minitel. The stuff was so great, it reached an incredibly high penetration rate in France, with about 9 million terminals for 55 million inhabitants by 1992. Here, you can see a video of a news report on the launch of system, circa 1982 (enjoy the clothing and hair style). Here's another video, likely from the early nineties, where broadcast television M6 suggest you connect to their Minitel site to decide which video clip will be played during the morning show.
Newpapers and other content providers loved the network because they made so much money out of it. See, to connect to the Minitel network, you had to dial up a centralized server, ran by the government. The government (through the Post and Telecommunications Ministry), would bill you by the minute. There was a price scale, but the most expensive services cost about 1 dollar a minute. We’re talking early-eighties dollars, too. The invoice would show up as part as your phone bill. The, the gov would rebate a large part of the fee to the content provider. Very effective pricing model. I believe the most successful of the news services where those where timing is everything, e.g. financial information.
The bottom line, with the right pricing model, information distribution over computer networks made the news industry significant money. So why is the Internet different, and why is the Internet blamed by newspapers? Could it be that the issue is not with the network, but with the culture that emerged from the community of network users? Tim mentioned hating Craig Newmark. That’s a step in the good direction - the direction of finding the “culprit”, that is. The Internet could revolve around a profit model. In fact, it does, in a lot of ways. I understand a number of journalists would prefer living in AOL’s gated community. But you should blame John Perry Barlow, Craig Newmark, et al, for the situation you find unpleasant. Not the network.
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I will never forget the first time I saw a minitel. I was studying in Toulouse in 2004, and I asked my host-dad to help me find the number of an old family friend. I thought he would help me search the phonebook, but instead he pulled a small computer out from under the phone table and proceeded to search for my number. I was mystified! Why didn't we have such a wonderful device in the U.S.? At that moment I felt the French really did have so many things right -- the food, the fashion ... and the minitel!
ReplyDeleteThis is an awesome story. And imagine how mesmerized you would have been had you been studying in France in 1984 instead of 2004!!
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