From: tholome@bangalore.esf.de (Eric Tholome)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.french
Subject: Re: Internet-to-Minitel access
Date: 5 Nov 92 12:25:15 GMT
Organization: ESF Headquarters, Berlin, FRG

In article <914@chorus.chorus.fr>, mir@chorus.chorus.fr (Adam Mirowski) writes:
|> dll@mitre.org (Daniel L. Leavitt) writes:
|> : I've heard that MINITEL has a messaging facility,
|> : like email I guess, for : its users.  
|> : Is this so and if so, can it be addressed from the
|> : Internet.  Then, how would one 
|> : determine an address for a MINITEL user?

Adam Mirowski already gave an answer to this request which doesn't satisfy me. It is indeed true that most foreigners don't have the right idea about Minitel, but I think this post deserves another kind of answer...

Minitel is "just" a terminal. As such, it lets you connect to thousands of services, several of them being (uncompatible) messaging facilities. BUT (yes, there is a but), among all those services, there are "official" services, i.e. services provided by France Telecom (the French Telco) themselves. And among those "official" services, there is a messaging facility called "minicom", which can be reached by dialing 3612. Anybody (with a phone line and a Minitel) can subscribe for free to this service.

When I first discovered this, I immediately thought: "boy, France Telecom is giving email to more than 20,000,000 people at a time!". Well, yes, except that it hasn't been advertised, and I don't think it is popular at all. Nevertheless, my second thought was: "maybe they will provide us with a two way gateway between Minicom and Internet". Now this would be really neat: you could send (normal) email to anybody with a phone line in France by using something like: <phone_number>@minicom.fr. And vice-versa.






Well, as you see Adam, the point isn't that a Minitel doesn't answer the phone, nor does it have enough memory. The necessary software is already available. The only missing thing is a "little" gateway between Internet and Minicom. But who's gonna make it? I wrote to France Telecom about this one, and never got a reply. I wonder what they'd think if someone did it on a private basis... (copyrighted idea :-)).

						Eric

Side note: other "non official" messaging facilities were about to offer a gateway between their service (available with Minitel to anybody) and Internet. I was really looking forward to it. At the very last minute, they withdrew, though. I don't know what the reason is, but I suspect there are some problems around this that people do not want to fight. In other words, I don't think I'm the first one to have thought of offering a Minitel service that would be a gateway to Internet, but it seems that all th




e ones (I'm thinking of 3614 TEASER for example) who tried to do it failed. Anybody knows why?
-- 
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