Minitel: a Mac 4 years before the first Mac?

Memories, memories, at least for those with a knowledge of daily life in 80s France... Mitterrand, Deneuve, Platini and THE MINITEL: a passive matrix screen with a 40 column display, 8 shades of grey (then 8 colours!), an original keyboard layout and connection to the telephone network at the extraordinary speed of 1.2KB to 9.6KB!

Today, our parent site, Les Numériques, has published a news piece on what is a French technological icon, quite rightly vaunting it as "the internet before the internet". It has to be said, rolling out the old Minitel story has been a recurring theme in recent French tech journalism. All the same, there was plenty to admire: 20 million terminals (!!!) that were distributed free and ready to go by France Telecom - all you had to pay for was the usage, dialing up with the old 36 15 prefix to access any number of services from holiday bookings to cinema times and online gaming...

This morning's piece of Minitel nostalgia has a Mac slant, quoting from a retro hi-tech article on TechYou claiming "France (almost) had a Mac, 4 years before the appearance of the first Mac."

> TechYou article in full (French lanugage)


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