Minitel — Museum of the Fallen

The Obituary

Minitel, the public face of France’s Teletel network, gave France a national online service a decade before most people heard of the internet. Rolled out from 1982, France Télécom handed terminals to telephone subscribers for free in place of paper directories, and users dialed into thousands of services: train tickets, bank balances, news, and the famously profitable “Minitel rose” adult chat lines. At its peak it reached around 9 million terminals. Its closed, centralized design that made it succeed early also boxed it in, and the open World Wide Web overtook it. France Télécom switched Minitel off on 30 June 2012.

Worth remembering

France gave the terminals away free, replacing printed phone directories, which seeded mass adoption.
The racy 'Minitel rose' chat services were an early and lucrative form of online socializing.

Gallery

A Minitel terminal in self-service public use Raphaël Labbé · CC BY-SA 2.0

Minitel B1 terminal from 1986, a later Minitel model Philafrenzy · CC BY-SA 4.0

Watch

La révolution du Minitel — INA Officiel

Sources

Minitel was rolled out in France from 1982 and shut down in June 2012 Wikipedia
France distributed Minitel terminals free to phone subscribers, reaching millions of households Britannica
Minitel use peaked in 1993 when users logged over 90 million hours; the government distributed terminals free to all telephone subscribers, and at shutdown in 2012 the service still had 800,000 subscribers IEEE Spectrum
France Télécom shut Minitel down on 30 June 2012 after 30 years; at closure it still retained 800,000 mostly older subscribers, generating over $1 billion annually at its peak New Atlas

A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.