Social media fever is so high lately, it can almost make us forget that communicating over a screen is actually way older than two thousand and five.
Actually the concept is older than me. Older than the Internet. And exclusively French!

Enters the Minitel

Source: wikipedia. Here is a flickr group about the beast.

Isn't he ugly as hell? For sure he is. But what was it, exactly?

A plastic box with a screen, a keyboard and a modem (dumb terminal).
Extremely easy to use, you just had to type a 4 digit number on your phone, connect the terminal and hang up. The hardest part was to type in the service name, and fill in the blanks. No mouse? You just had to press the "send" or "menu" key.

Inexpensive at the time, and connected to the phone lines, it would let you:

• search the yellow/white page
• send faxes
  
• check the stock market
• shop online
• check train and plane schedule and purchase the tickets
• translate text
• consult various databases
• play online 
• chat (cybersex...yes, already!)
• post on bulletin boards

The Minitel in figures (Sources: wikipedia, l'expansion.com)

late 1990's: Minitel connections were stable at 100 million a month plus 150 million online directory inquiries, in spite of growing Internet use
late 1990's: Minitel sales in the late accounted for almost 15% of sales at La Redoute and 3 Suisses, France's biggest mail order companies
1998: Minitel generated € 832 million ($1,121 million) of revenue
1999: almost 9 million terminals — including web-enabled personal computers — had access to the network, used by 25 million people
2005: there were 351 million calls for 18.51 million hours of connection, generating € 206 million of revenue
2009: there still were 1,5 million active terminals all around France

Way before the Internet, start-ups were already making money out of online chat, forum and cybersex, the foundations of today's social media. Informative enough, when you still can read online marketing being promoted as the 'new hotness'...
I don't mean to lessen the importance of SNS marketing, but some nostalgia is not that bad for the mind. And...er...get off my lawn? :D

Posted via email from @Danny_Fr