[10694] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Internet vs Minitel : a futuristic view of the network evolution ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Fred Baker)
Sat Mar 5 21:24:34 1994
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 1994 09:50:25 -0800
To: LEHOUX@vax.lse.ac.uk
From: fbaker@acc.com (Fred Baker)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Thierry:
>> I am awaiting for all your comments and critics.
I will be glad to give you my comments, but my most severe critics aren't
on this list to my knowledge.
>> In the world, there are two networks which have the same characteristics of
>> growth and of aim : Internet and Minitel.
I'm not sure I agree with the opening sentence of your abstract. These
really don't have the same aim or growth characteristics. If "the" aim of
the Internet can be defined, it is to connect where no man has ever
connected before. The aim of the Minitel is/was to interconnect France in a
manner superior to their older (and still fabled) example of how to not
build a telephone network, and in so doing, to make francs materialize in
France Telecom's pocket. If the reason people attach to the Internet can be
summed up in a single sentence, it's so they can have access to the
resources it makes available. The reason people attach to Minitel is
because they want a phone.
Not that I wouldn't like to have the services that Minitel offers... I was
in both France and England last summer, around the IETF meeting in
Amsterdam. My wife about died when she called a bookstore (during the three
days we were in London) to ask if they had a particular title in stock; the
answering machine said "we don't do our business over the phone; if you
want to correspond with us, write to the address ____." Since one obviously
couldn't get a human to answer the phone, and the purpose of the answering
machine was to inform the caller of the fact, she wondered why the store
didn't just get rid of the phone? I understand (though I wasn't able to
check it out, as I don't speak French) that tele-shopping is a standardized
service of Minitel; the shopkeeper need only supply France Telecom with his
inventory/price list, and the computer will handle it all by itself. Nice.
You are correct that Minitel's user interface (all one of them) is easier
to use than MS-DOS, and it's probably easier to use than UNIX. I'm not sure
what you think of the Mac. You seem to like Gopher and not FTP; I'm amazed
that you don't evaluate archie, WAIS, or WWW. I don't know what sort of
mail server Minitel provides - is it better or worse than, say, Elm or
Eudora? Or Sun's Mail Tool? or Network News? I suppose that you COULD get
your weather update via Gopher, FTP, or (used to be) email exchange with
certain universities; I kind of like to pull down the latest IR GIF from
WWW and peruse it. If Minitel has a good impedance match for you, you're
in, and if not, you're out. No such problem with the internet's user
interfaces. If you don't like one, try another.
So, in comparing these, you have at least three issues:
- do the networks provide the services that users desire of it?
- do the networks have at least one user interface that people find useful?
- are people effectively forced to use the network for some purpose?
I would argue that the first two are apparently true of both; the third is
true of Minitel, and (since the prospective customer is paying for minitel)
is somewhat of an entry bar for the Internet.
That being the case: I am a router vendor. Are you aware that some of the
largest private and government internets that use my equipment are located
in France, where your premise is that Minitel can and does reign supreme?
People bypass like crazy!
Maybe that's why Minitel is still at least two orders of magnitude smaller
than the Internet, and why the technology supporting it hasn't been
exported...
=============================================================================
Fred Baker (fbaker@acc.com)
Advanced Computer Communications
