John Rollins wrote:
> - Alcatel Terminatel. Hmm... Some wierd French data terminal I picked up
> at a surplus store, I think for $10. Built in modem, cute little flip-down
> AZERTY keyboard... Kinda useless, but it's fun to stare at...
Yes, that would not be much use in the States. This is a French minitel
terminal. Many years ago, the story I heard was that the French
telephone service decided that it would stop printing telephone
directories and use the savings to set up an online directory enquiry
system. They basically gave every telephone subscriber a free terminal.
They also set it up so that other companies could provide information to
subscribers using that terminal, with charges being added to the
customer's phone bill, rather like your 900 numbers.
This resulted in an explosion of services and gave FRance the first
public data access system - sort of like the WWW, though much slower.
France still uses the minitel system, more so that the internet because
of the inertia of the existing services.
They are still printing telephone directories though ;-)
--
Hans B. Pufal : <mailto:hansp_at_digiweb.com>
Comprehensive Computer Catalogue : <http://www.digiweb.com/~hansp/ccc/>
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Received on Fri Mar 06 1998 - 15:05:34 GMT