France Telecom said today that it was shutting down its ground-breaking Minitel service, the proto-Internet that brought online shopping and chat rooms into millions of French homes in the 1980s. When I think of Minitel, though, I think of Anne.
At fourteen, I was a Francophile with a pen-pal named Anne who would write me long letters in water-blue loopy script on graph paper. We traded cassettes of sappy 1980s soft rock: she sent me Jean-Jacques Goldman, I sent her Billy Joel. I was also hardcore into the New York City BBS scene, with a scrawl of local phone numbers tacked to the wall of my room as I patiently dialed, redialed, redialed the lines of my favorite boards.
So in the spring of 1989, when I heard the French Minitel system was beta testing in New York, I was all over it. I'd already skipped some similar systems, like QuantumLink. But this was a chance to get on board with something nobody knew about, talking to French people—actual French people!—and perhaps having live chats with my tousle-headed moppet in Evreux.
Minitel was huge compared to the bulletin boards I was used to, and far more mainstream (at least among the French) than Compuserve, the biggest online service of the time. None of the BBS kids I knew used Compuserve; it charged by the hour, and it was way too expensive. Instead, we traded messages on local bulletin boards, on the BBS exchange system Fidonet or on early ISPs like the Big Electric Cat in New York. The Minitel USA beta was free for those of us willing to fire up the semi-functional Mac software and help work out the bugs.
And Minitel had a huge population of exotic French people to talk to. By 1990, France had 5 million Minitel terminals sitting in living rooms. Since it didn't require an expensive, hard-to-configure PC and the charges appeared effortlessly on your phone bill, it attracted a more ordinary crowd than the typical geeky American BBS. The folks I spoke to treated it as an electronic phone book with chat rooms attached.
I made a deal to meet Anne in one of the Minitel chat rooms at 4pm my time, 10pm her time. Here's where ancient memories get fuzzy. I remember wandering through virtual rooms, asking whether anyone had seen her handle. I don't remember if she ever actually showed up.
"Quel cri de coeur!" someone in a chat room typed. For a little while, they scoured the Intranet, a bunch of French folk called into battle by a cry of love.
I never did fall in love with Anne, but I think we represented something mysterious and enticing to each other. Back in those days before the Web, before cheap international flights, when things foreign were so much harder to see and touch, I'd check the mailbox anxiously each morning, waiting for a thick envelope with strange stamps and sometimes a well-thought-out little present. Walking around New York, I'd sometimes think about how to explain the city to her.
She invited me to her country house that summer. The trip was a total disaster. I was ill with culture shock and language confusion, writing long letters to my new girlfriend at home and listening to the Cure's "Disintegration" over and over. Anne was obsessed with her own new boyfriend and treated me as a third wheel, shrugging me off whenever possible. Her family's charming Pyreneean retreat was full of fleas, and the trip ended up melting down at the end with her mother writing a letter to my parents full of insults and demanding money.
About 15 years later, Anne messaged me on ICQ. Nobody needed Minitel any more; we had the Internet. She was a therapist now, and trying to reconcile the misunderstandings in her life. We agreed that I'd been awkward and strange, and that she had been obsessed with her boyfriend. We agreed we had both been 15. I hope she's doing well.
Minitel USA was a failure. The service's peak came in 1991, when France Telecom started a joint venture with US West to supply Minitel-like services to millions of people in the USA. But by then domestic online services such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe offered bigger user bases, and AOL was cracking the code of how to get "ordinary people" online. Three years later, the true Internet boom began.
Minitel has been dying in France for years, too. The Internet killed it. The only reason to mourn it is nostalgia. And in my mind, it will always be connected with something so French: an exotic mystery, and a moment's possibility of teenage romance.