Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond ...

Back then, France punched above its weight when it came to tech. The EU needs it to rediscover its taste for the cutting edge, says Paris-based writer Alexander Hurst ...

If you paid a visit to France in the 1980s the chances are you’d have been surprised to see a little brown screen and keyboard sitting next to the telephones wherever you went. At the time, it was ...

Long before there was the iPhone, users in France had another connected device with which they could do everything from check movie listings or the weather to chatting with other users or booking ...

Its famous "Minitel Rose" sex chat lines were blamed for the astronomical phone bills of many unwitting customers. Originally designed by France Telecom as an online directory to save paper, the ...

France pulls the plug on the Minitel this weekend, a home — grown precursor of the Internet which brought on — line banking, travel reservations and even sex chats to millions a decade before the ...

This essay is divided in two main parts. In the first one, the history of French telematic is briefly exposed. Its protagonist, the «Minitel» terminal, is today present in a great number of French ...

PARIS -- Strange but true: The Minitel is still up and running. The clunky French data communications system, which blossomed into the world's first mass-market online network in the 1980s, has found ...

PARIS (Reuters) - France pulls the plug on the Minitel this weekend, a home-grown precursor of the Internet which brought on-line banking, travel reservations and even sex chats to millions a decade ...