minitel

plural minitels

1. A Minitel terminal

alternative MINITEL

1. historicalA French videotex service utilising the telephone network, popular before and alongside the World Wide Web.

   The lesson of MINITEL is that hypermedia within Europe should be developed as a hybrid of state intervention, capitalist entrepreneurship and d.i.y. culture.

   1995 September, Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology”, in Mute, volume 1, number 3, →ISSN, archived from the original on 19 Oct 2021

   1 more example

   Minitel was a computer terminal. It housed a screen, a keyboard, and a modem—but not a microprocessor. Instead of computing on its own, Minitel connected to remote services via uplink, like a 1960s mainframe or a modern Google Chromebook. Terminals were given out, for free, to every French telephone subscriber by the state (which also ran the phone company).

   2017 June 16, Julien Mailand, “Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet”, in The Atlantic