Remember, at the time the Telco was a government department in a country that firmly believes in industrial policy.
De Gaulle had neglected the country's phone network and it was in a piteous state by the 1960s. A popular comedy sketch, "Le 22 à Asnières" by Fernand Raynaud had the hapless protagonist trying to call number 22 at Asnières and it was such an ordeal he only managed to get connected by a telephone operator in New York...
During the 70s, specially under the technocratic president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the French government invested massively to catch up and for several years the Directorate-General of Telecommunications was the single largest government department by budget. They bet massively on digital switching and created huge telco gear vendors in Alcatel. Towards the end of the 70s that massive surge of investment had started to dwindle and the government was trying to figure out what could be the next wave to foster the telecommunications equipment industry, and Minitel was the answer.
It didn't export well. There was a trial in the US with US West, but it didn't pan out. My former boss Jean Lebrun was one of the key people on the electronic phone directory project, and at the time it was the largest real-time database in the world. It was essentially a distributed in-memory database build on 1980s computer technology, and as you can imagine very expensive. Fun story: Oracle tried to get them to evaluate their RDBMS for the project, and even gave them access to the source code, but it was found to be inadequate.
De Gaulle had neglected the country's phone network and it was in a piteous state by the 1960s. A popular comedy sketch, "Le 22 à Asnières" by Fernand Raynaud had the hapless protagonist trying to call number 22 at Asnières and it was such an ordeal he only managed to get connected by a telephone operator in New York...
During the 70s, specially under the technocratic president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the French government invested massively to catch up and for several years the Directorate-General of Telecommunications was the single largest government department by budget. They bet massively on digital switching and created huge telco gear vendors in Alcatel. Towards the end of the 70s that massive surge of investment had started to dwindle and the government was trying to figure out what could be the next wave to foster the telecommunications equipment industry, and Minitel was the answer.
It didn't export well. There was a trial in the US with US West, but it didn't pan out. My former boss Jean Lebrun was one of the key people on the electronic phone directory project, and at the time it was the largest real-time database in the world. It was essentially a distributed in-memory database build on 1980s computer technology, and as you can imagine very expensive. Fun story: Oracle tried to get them to evaluate their RDBMS for the project, and even gave them access to the source code, but it was found to be inadequate.