The End of Minitel

ZeldorBlat writes "The French Minitel service is closing it's doors at the end of today. Started in 1982, Minitel provides several services now widely available on the web including phone listings, train ticketing, and many other third-party content. Many prefered it to the web for it's simplicity and perceived security. The system is to be replaced with Le Compte Achats, available to businesses only. The notice can be found here."

too bad

[Fezzik]

I remember using Minitel maybe 10 years ago when I lived in Paris briefly. It was nice because it was very, very focused. There were no banner ads, no flashy graphics, just plain text and enough buttons to get the job done. There's no technical reason we couldn't have the same thing on the Web, but because there is so much more you can do, we get sites like Amazon's (not to pick on them; they're all bad) with 500 options that take forever to load on slow connections and nobody really wants anyway. And don't even get me started on embedded Flash movies.

Wrong !

[alexhs]

FTFNotice :

To allow you to access to the Minitel services you need, in 2007, we suggest another of our products : Le Compte Achats.

Minitel services haven't been closed, web-based "minitelfr" allowing access to Minitel services from the Internet has been. Minitel like BSD still is dying but not dead yet.

The End??

[4D6963]

Hold on, the end of the Minitel? Nothing less? Because when I look at the main Minitel [minitel.fr] page there is no such thing. Plus it seems to me that if the Minitel network would stop working I would have heard about it quite a lot from my family, on TV and I'm sure we would have returned the terminal to France Télécom, not to mention that the Slashdot article would have been edited.

It rather seems that the news is rather about some particular online (on the web) service, not the end of the network itselves.

Re:the reason for its popularity was billing users

[Lost Engineer]

This is -1 offtopic, but apartment has one 'p' in English. In French, it has two. Since I got regular spelling tests in French but not English from middle school on, I spelled it wrong for years. Thank goodness for spell checking in Firefox 2.0. No I'm not using it right now, so don't ream me for spelling errors.