Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond ...

If you paid a visit to France in the 1980s the chances are you’d have been surprised to see a little brown screen and keyboard sitting next to the telephones wherever you went. At the time, it was ...

Long before there was the iPhone, users in France had another connected device with which they could do everything from check movie listings or the weather to chatting with other users or booking ...

Back then, France punched above its weight when it came to tech. The EU needs it to rediscover its taste for the cutting edge In the 1960s, France became the third country, after the US and Soviet ...

Before there was AOL, Amazon, Groupon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! or any of today’s other Internet titans, there was the Minitel: the boxy little terminal that allowed French clients to access a wide ...

France pulls the plug on the Minitel this weekend, a home — grown precursor of the Internet which brought on — line banking, travel reservations and even sex chats to millions a decade before the ...

In 1991, most Americans had not yet heard of the internet. But all of France was online, buying, selling, gaming, and chatting, thanks to a ubiquitous little box that connected to the telephone. It ...

The history of the internet is measured in dog years - if you've been using it for 12 months, you're an old hand; since the 1990s, and you're a veteran. But as far back as 1983, a band of pioneers ...

After 30 years of service, France’s Minitel information service is shutting down for good. Launched in 1982 by the French state telephone company Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications (PTT), which ...

France’s Minitel was a precursor to the internet, decades ahead of its time. At its peak in the mid-1990s, some 20 million people logged on every day. But on Saturday 30 June it's being shut down for ...