It is known as the "Little French Box", a s design classic now seen as the ultimate in beige plastic kitsch. But once it was an audacious precursor to the world wide web, introduced the first cybersex into people's living rooms and had a user-friendly design that may have inspired Steve Jobs's first Macintosh computer.
Yet, on Saturday, the plug will finally be pulled on the Minitel machine, France's one-time pride and joy, 30 years after its launch. And while the nation marvels at the fact that , of the clunky terminals with massive buttons are still in circulation, the Minitel is shedding its square image and enjoying a moment of mass nostalgia.
Farewell parties and newspaper memorials are reminiscing about the time when, thanks to the Minitel, the French public could electronically check the weather, book a holiday, monitor their bank accounts and view share prices or horoscopes more than a decade before any other country. And yet the Minitel failed to sell abroad and existed in almost glorious isolation in France.
The Minitel was dreamed up in the s when France was lagging behind on telecommunications, with the nation's homes underserved by telephones — particularly in rural areas. Amid a technological dawn in France, it was, with the TGV railway, a matter of political and national pride.
The state communications company came up with a system combining the telephone and information technology and, in , rolled out the Minitel, delivering the sets free to homes — the first widely available screen-keyboard combination in any country.
