For seven decades, our newspaper has covered and analyzed all the highlights of our contemporary history between decolonization, the Cold War, European construction, the advent of the Fifth Republic… It is committed to social struggles such as the abolition of the death penalty or the emancipation of women and welcomed great feathers like François Mauriac, Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre. Turning the pages of our archiveswe invite you to relive the news of the past seventy years.
In this 1992 archive, Martine Esquirou answers the questions who and what is the Minitel for? and even evokes the ambition of its establishment in the United States. Appeared in 1982, the Minitel, this French specificity, was then in full swing before its disappearance in 2012 swept away by the worldwide success of the Internet.
L’Express of February 6, 1992
Radioscopy of Minitel addicts
It’s a vast tribe of mutants, interconnected to each other… and to some 17,200 services: a sociological phenomenon. Born in the early 1980s, the French minitellists, the world’s leading group of videotex fans, consumed 270,000 hours of telematics in 1991 — compared to 10,000 in 1988! A real bulimia, which first meets their everyday practical needs: transport, banking services and mail-order purchases. The pink Minitel in fact represents only 5% of the number of connections – but 15%, however, of the volume of “traffic”. Every two years, France Telecom, which manages a fleet of 6 million Minitels, surveys these new users, all enthusiasts – only 5% of Minitels are not used! The latest study of its kind, entrusted to the firm Sereho and made public on February 5, confirms, if necessary, the operator in the bet he launched ten years ago, of telematics within everyone’s reach.
Composite portrait of Minitel users in L’Express of February 6, 1992.
© / The Express
Even if the trend today is confirmed by strong professional use. The number of rented Minitels is growing faster than that of free ones, thanks to an increasingly varied range of devices and enriched services. At the forefront, the Minitel 10 and 12: with integrated answering machines and a memory of 50 telephone numbers, they allow, for example, to lock their use; Only certain services remain freely accessible, such as the electronic directory, the oldest and most current of all. New services – on 36.28 or 36.29 – have appeared, allowing access – obviously protected – to databases with very high added value, such as the Fil de l’AFP or referenced catalogs from the CNRS.
Very logically, the minitelliste, more and more fond of telematics in the context of his work, is rather a man, between 25 and 49 years old – this age group alone accounts for 60% of users. To better satisfy them, France Telecom is launching public “Minitel phone points” this year, a videotex photo service and further increasing the speed of access to the network. And continues to set up networks abroad, mainly in Europe, and most recently in the United States, where the French company has real ambitions. France Telecom, which will have invested 20 billion francs in the operation, hopes to recover its costs by 1998. Gérard Théry, the brilliant inventor of the Minitel, could he have imagined at the time the crazy success that was going to meet this simplified computer, intended, at the start, to replace the directory?…