Advent of Computing - Episode 13.5 - Minitel Research Lab Interview, with Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll

Episode Date: September 29, 2019

Today I am joined by Julien Mailland and Kevon Driscoll, co-authors of Minitel: Welcome to the Internet and proprietors of the Minitel Research Lab(minitel.us). We talk about their book, how they first started working on Minitel terminals, and the ongoing work to preserve Minitel.

Welcome back to Advent of Computing. Now this episode is something special, and it's a first for the podcast that I'm really excited about. This is going to be a companion to the last episode, which concerned the French Minitel network. So if you haven't already, then I suggest you go and listen to that episode. I can wait. Now, if you're done listening, while working on the last episode, I leaned heavily on one source, and that's the book Minitel, Welcome to the Internet, by Julian Malund and Kevin Driscoll. Their book chronicles the history of Minitel and its impact on France. The two also run Minitel.us, the Minitel Research

Lab, which was another great and really important source for me during my research into the topic. great and really important source for me during my research into the topic. All this is to say, I highly recommend both the book and their site. Anyway, I reached out to Kevin and Julian and was lucky enough to get a chance to discuss Minitel, their research, and ongoing preservation efforts with them. So this episode is going to be that interview. One more thing before I roll the tape. This is the first ever interview on Advent of Computing. That's really exciting, and I'm really proud to present it. But that being said, some of the audio

may be a little less than the best. I'm still getting the hang of the whole recording multiple inputs thing. So if you can get past a little bit of my amateur patina, then there's a great discussion on the topic of computer history underneath. Now, without further blabbing, here's my interview with Julian Maland and Kevin Driscoll. Welcome to Adren of Computing. Can you two go ahead and introduce yourselves? Sure. I'm Julian Maland. I'm professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. Welcome to Adren of Computing. Can you two go ahead and introduce yourselves? Sure. I'm Julian Malin. I'm professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. And I'm Kevin Driscoll. I'm assistant professor of media studies at University of Virginia.

As far as English language books, you two kind of have written the book, so to speak, on Minitel. And I know that it's been a really important resource for me because I can't read French. So how did you two originally learn about Minitel and what made you interested in researching it? Cool. Well, this is Julian here. I'm originally from France. So I grew up using Minitel as a teenager.

And I can read French, obviously, which made it easier to do interviews and research. And then I was doing my PhD dissertation at the University of Southern California about it. And this is where I met Kevin, whom I let explain how he got in the project. Yeah, so Julian and I had cubicles in this basement office as grad students, and we were both working on different projects related to kind of regulation

and culture on different kinds of networks. kind of regulation and culture on different kinds of networks. And I learned about Minitel from Julian and seeing the terminal on his desk in his cubicle. And we started talking about it. And initially our collaboration was more for fun. Like we had our scholarly research that we were doing, but we would get together on the weekends and just like mess around with the terminals and see if we could get them to do things. And there had already been like a community of people online sharing resources with each other.

So we were able to get some technical documentation. electronics in Southern California and get parts and try to like put together circuits so that we could send information from our laptops over to the Minitel terminals. And then, um, yeah, we were working on different research in my area had kind of been in parallel, in parallel, temporarily with Julian's where I was writing about dial up bulletin boards in North America. temporarily with Julian's where I was writing about dial-up bulletin boards in North America. And there's a lot of resonance here, kind of in the theme of this podcast, around how do these stories that we tell or don't tell about the past shape how we think about networks in the present and how we think about their future. So time went on and we had moved and we were doing different jobs and things. And then Julian approached me about building on the research that he had already done to develop

this book about Minitel together that would kind of bridge our two interests in the topic. And then we really got down to business on it. Very good. So just for some context about what year did you guys start working on the minitel book since um minitel of course went offline in 2012 yeah i actually started working on um i'm a lawyer uh and i worked in industry for a while before um going back to school and when i was in law school um i started doing comparative research looking at how the French government's experience with regulating Minotaur was informing the government's experience with trying to regulate the Internet and that was I did that research in 2000, published in 2001. So the legal part of the research started then.

And then I started doing the policy and social science aspect research in 2008. And then I started my dissertation. I started my dissertation. And so it was perfect timing because then I was able to go and attend all the events that surrounded the closing of the system in 2012. I was in France when it happened. And then, Kevin, you started in what, 2009, 2010?

Yeah, so I met you in 2009 and then i think we really got cooking on the project probably around 2010 2011 because that's when we created minitel.us and started to like organize some of the materials that we were collecting um and photographing the terminals and documenting more of the things that we had found and it was almost the website came before the book before we thought seriously about writing the book um and then i guess we started to really put together the book probably in 2014 yeah and it was it was really good timing because um 2012, when they shut down the system, there was a lot going on in France. There were a lot of wakes type events where France Telecom organized an event that involved several of the people who were involved in the project back then that I was able to interview.

And then there's a big community of hackers in France, a lot of them were Minitel entrepreneurs, so they weren't on the network side but they were on the content server side. And they were also having their own parties And this is when they also started redoing kind of creative activities around the network. Kevin, you mentioned that prior to the Minitel research, you had been looking at BBSs, which of course are more stateside and probably more recognizable to American listeners. So how do you think Minitel fits in when compared to that kind

of ecosystem? Well, I think Julian and I have been writing in the context of a much better known story about the history of the internet that tends to focus on military researchers in the United States or Silicon Valley companies. And there are some well-known stories there. And we felt like those stories didn't really explain all of what you could see, the richness of the early web and then the kind of later systems to come, it didn't really make sense that how all of these things seem to spring out of nowhere. And so the bulletin board systems gives us kind of this alternative way of telling that story of how networks developed in different regions of North America. But the bulletin board system story

isn't really disconnected from Minitel because there are many bulletin boards throughout Europe and other parts of the world. And it's actually an area of some new research that we've been doing of looking at bulletin board-like systems running alongside in parallel with Minitel. We're almost like getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. But if you think about like what a Minitel terminal is,

it's a keyboard and a screen and a modem. And in the United States, the biggest barrier to people getting online initially was the cost of getting a modem. It was expensive and it was hard to explain to someone who'd never gone online why it was worth getting a modem in the first place. In France you don't have that barrier because the terminal is provided for free and so you take away one of the

major roadblocks of people starting to explore going online which is why people in France were doing all the things that we would see people doing in North America 10 or 15 or 20 years later. Online dating, searching for jobs, buying and selling used goods, all these kinds of activities that we associate with maybe America Online or later social web kinds of services spring up around Minitel and partly because of reducing those barriers to entry. To bounce off that a little bit, Julian, what was it like to use Minitel on a day-to-day basis as a teenager? That's an excellent question. Here's the thing is that Minitel for most French

people on a daily basis consisted essentially of looking at giant billboards, mostly for sexy chat services that were on all of the walls of every city in France. In practice, though, very few people use Minitel on a daily basis, at least not on the retail consumer side. And the reason was that because it was very, very, very expensive. We're talking up to several dollars of two days a minute.

And so people at home had one because the phone company would give you one for free and in fact threatened to discontinue the paper phone book so you had to take a minute though so people had them in their homes but you didn't use it very often because it was so expensive. So I know in my family, we used it for a few things. One of them was the phone book, and that was free. But then for other things, it was a very rare occurrence. Some of the times I used it was for things that you were required to use Minitel. So, for example, when I had to register for the military service, I had to do it over Minitel. If I wanted to register for school, you had to register through the Minitel.

I had them at work, and they were able to use them a lot more often because the boss was paying and there were a lot of very very useful professional services on there. There were also sexy chat rooms and so a lot of people on the workplace actually use their work minute to go on these chat rooms and because the system was completely anonymized your employer couldn't actually track what you were doing on the minute during the work hours and so sexy chat was quite a popular thing on the workplace that did have terminals. That makes a lot of sense. Definitely an easy way to abuse having a work computer. So one of the large takeaways from your book is that Minitel was a lot more successful than later writers would make it out to be.

So what do you think were some of the most successful parts of the project that Minitel really stuck? And where do you think it fell short in some aspects? Sure, I think we both probably have some ideas. The big picture is it offers us a chance to redefine success. And so the ways that sometimes folks had talked about Minitel as a failure was to suggest that Minitel failed in comparison to something like the graphical web or even broadband internet later. And that's not really taking the system on its own terms. And so if we look from the goals that were set out for the system in the early 1980s, it's wildly successful in terms of its diffusion across society and its adoption.

And one of the things that was most striking to us was how much creativity there was around the edges of the system. Because while the kind of central infrastructure, the directories and the access points and the packet switching network connecting all of the terminals and the nodes was administered by a national service, most of the services that people were accessing beyond the phone book and some of the state services were run by private third parties. beyond the phone book and some of the state services were run by private third parties.

So there's stories that you come across, and we document a few in the book of people dropping out of college to run services or services being built alongside of popular television shows or to support particular subcultures, lots of regional kinds of bulletin board slash chat type of services. And those were all unplanned. Those are things that hadn't been part of the plan from the outside of Minitel. It really was to build a platform that could host the creativity of these third parties. And so looking at the range of services that were available on the system by the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s,

it's really striking to just see the diversity of applications that people imagined and actually built to run over it. Do you have anything to add to that, Julian? Yeah, and also I think when we think about failure, you know, you read a lot of things about how, you know, in the Silicon Valley narrative saying Minotaur is a failure for two reasons. One of them is that it was completely centralized.

The other one is evidenced by the fact that we are all now on the Internet and not on Minotaur. that and not on Minitel. Both of these things, I think, are as Kevin mentioned, Minitel was not completely centralized. It was a hybrid architecture. There is architecture and their impact on innovation and it's worth noting that at the time if you compare to the penetration and the penetration of

online services in the US, barely anyone in the US was online whereas pretty much everyone in the US was online. I think that's one take up. The other one, you know, I think Minitel was, in 2012, it was the end of the cycle, right? Just because the horse carriage gets replaced by the electric car doesn't mean that horses pulling a carriage were a bad idea or a failure. It just ended because we came up with better technologies, and I think that's what happened with Minitel. Yeah, one of the questions that we raise in the book that I think is fun to talk about is that if we map out Minitel as this project

that lasted from roughly 1982 to roughly to exactly 2012, we have this like single coherent communication network that functioned continuously for 30 years. And we have very few examples in the world of IT of systems that worked that reliably for that long. And while its profitability peak was somewhere in the early 1990s and then it tapers off, there was a not insignificant number of people and organizations continuing to use the network right up until the end. And some of that is documented in the popular press of the time who were basically going around being like, who's still using Minitel and interviewing, you know, the farmer who gets the

price of, you know, pork bellies before bringing their pig to market and things like that. These kind of like quirky folks still hanging on. But it revealed that there were certain advantages to Minitel that none of the systems that came afterwards were compelling enough to entice somebody to switch over. And so that story alone is from a historical point of view is really interesting that these things that even though they seem to be replaced and they kind of fade from everyday popular culture, they don't go away away they like linger on in unpredictable ways and they'll just you'll still find them in like the corners of stores and places like that and it seems like a lot of the big success of minitel was it was built to just fade into the

background instead of being a really big in your face um always connected kind of service and we're just starting to get to that with the internet today or at least i think that's a really interesting question and i don't know that we can say for sure that there was that that type of vision because certainly some people who worked on it hoped that minitel would be like, you know, the dominant platform for interactive entertainment across not just France, but the world. Something like Videotech was a very powerful vision for lots of different people and organizations. It kind of is like anticipating something like interactive television. kind of is like anticipating something like interactive television. But at the same time, the design of the Minitel terminals was such that they could be taken out and used and then put away.

So like two of the most common terminal designs were the flip-up keyboard that would flip up and cover the screen or the slide-away keyboard that would like slide under the screen. And most of the Minitel terminals that you see have a handle on the top of them. And they're quite light so that they could be like put in a drawer or put away. And that does suggest something like what you're saying, which is like you periodically access this network. You're not it's not its aim is not to be ubiquitous, always on 24-7 kind of technology. Moving on to another question.

What were some of the issues you came across when researching Minitel that surprised you? Because obviously a lot of the sites after 2012 were gone and a lot of the services had left before then. So there's a lot of ephemeral kind of things around it. So what were some of the large problems you ran into? ephemeral kind of things around it so what were some of the large problems you ran into yeah one of the things is that it's very very difficult to do an in-depth study of what was going on for example in the chat rooms because uh these things were not recorded uh so there's really no, as you said, you know, actual tangible trace of what happened there. So that means you got to rely on other sources of, you know, primary material like interviews and things like that. that at the same time, and I would say surprisingly for me,

and I think Kevin can talk about this more, is that there's been a revival of Minitel coding and Minitel hacking that enables one to still interact with the system even after it is officially shut down. Kevin, you want to elaborate on that? Sure. I mean, there are materials available to us now that would have been great to have when we were writing the book, but it's this process. And I think, you know, we're not the only ones who have been doing work on Minatel history

and the excitement around it is motivating to people who may have a box of diskettes somewhere in their home that they retrieve and then go through the process of imaging the disks and trying to get the data from them. But so for example, now we have the source code for some of the host systems. And that is an area of creativity that demands some further inquiry, because while France Telecom published standards and protocols on how the network should function, they really let people who are building the third party services do whatever they want. As long as your host conformed to the communication protocols and the policies of the network, you could run it on an Apple II. You could run it on a Apple II. You could run it on a big time-sharing Unix system. You could run it on a workstation. You could run it on a Mac Plus. Lots of people running systems on Atari ST and Amiga. So there were whatever people had at hand,

they could attempt to connect to Minitel and start exchanging packets with other people over the network. So there is a really wide diversity of people who had to figure out how to build services for this. And we were able to get at this in the book through interviews in part, and then also from contemporary print materials covering the system. So it's a pretty big phenomenon. So there's newspaper articles and tech magazines would talk about it. And in fact, there's quite a lot of coverage in the press in England and the US also that's accessible to English readers and speakers. So for example, in 1983, Byte Magazine ran a special

issue on video tech that had a bunch of writing about Minitel, which is fun to read now because they're like, you know, the French got this network going on, but like it's going to hit the U.S. any day. And that year, Radio Shack had a special full page in their catalog for video tech terminals. None of this came to pass, obviously, but they had sent reporters over to France or were communicating with journalists there. So we have some documentation of people in the moment talking to the folks who are building services. And that's how you have to get at these systems that are so ephemeral.

And I should also shout out, we're in a community of people who do this kind of research and a recent book that talks explicitly about this problem is called dot com design by historian megan sapner anchorson and she talks about trying to write about flash animations on the early web and how they're not well preserved at all. And she would look at like videos about other topics, but in the background of the video would be somebody's computer screen and you, or they might be doing something on the computer

where they would reveal like a accurate representation of what this piece of software should have looked like. And that was part of our technique for the Minitel history too. Like Minitel appears in a handful of movies and TV shows and music videos and things like that. So we have video evidence of Minitel appearing on TV and in cinema. And so those are almost better representations of Minitel than if we are running an emulator on a modern day computer today. Yeah, because with a system like minitel context obviously really

important it's kind of like or it sounds kind of like trying to capture bigfoot pictures that's a really funny way to think about it yeah there and there are things that like a librarian or an archivist might not think to add to the metadata for something so um yeah like a a story about that has Minitel in it may not be found in a simple search for like Minitel in a database so here's a big question that I see a lot of people online and in person also not understanding what's important about preservation efforts like this and why we should care about older technology so why do you two think that minitel in specific and in general this kind of ephemeral networking should be preserved today yeah i think the topic in general is I think it's increasingly important to look at policy issues and legal issues in addition to technical issues related to old system

because we are at a time where we're facing very complicated policy issues in the U.S., for example, net neutrality and privacy online. And a lot of politicians and lobbyists and scholars seem to think that these issues appear in 1995 with the web coming to America. But the thing is that those issues of legalities and privacy and, you know, what is the appropriate level of government involvement and private sector involvement to support innovation, those issues have been thought about, negotiated, litigated, and figured out in a way 20, 30 years ago. And so I think it's important to look at this artifact if we are going to think through these issues and come up with good policies for the Internet going forward. the internet going forward and preserving the actual

artifact that is part of preserving the entire history. Yeah, something that I would add to that is when we're talking about some problem in the present, like privacy or centralization, monopolies,

exploitation of content moderators, people will often run up to a wall in terms of imagination which is this system is something like facebook is so widespread and for many people it is the it has been the dominant system for the entire time that they have been an adult using the internet. And so they will try to imagine alternatives to Facebook and be trying to imagine them from whole cloth. But we know from a case like Minitel, we have this system that ran under very different political, economic, and social conditions, and yet provided a lot of similar services. And so we don't have to just

wholly imagine from nothing what alternatives to the present might be. We can look to the past for models. And there are great ideas that may have been abandoned, paths not taken, systems that people were talking about then, arguments that might be useful for us in the present. And so I think often of our book Minotaur as like being one of a emerging set of histories that explore these parallel stories from the 70s, 80s, and 90s leading up to the present that show pathways that are maybe different

than the ones that we're on now. So like Joy Liseisi Rankin's book looks at all these time sharing networks in the US and campus networks like Plato at the University of Illinois. There is also, I'm trying to think, there's like just such a number of books in the same series as ours. Alison Gazzard has this book about the BBC micro and the project of like distributing microcomputers into schools in the UK. And these things were these people who were working on these various projects were in

communication with one another. And so it felt to them like they're part of this, you know, global emerging phenomenon. And in a way, like our imagination has like it's shrank back down in this period of high centralization and and platform control and i think going back to these histories lets us explode that a little bit and imagine bigger alternative futures for what the internet might be that's really well put um so that's all i have for you two today so i want to thank both of you so much for coming on this has been really great to get to talk to you about the network before we sign off are there

any projects you two are working on that you want to plug next minute or is that too early yeah well i can say um so in the realm of Minitel, I mean, one thing we've been gathering materials on for a while is this, like I mentioned, this phenomenon of dial-up bulletin board-like systems that exist on the margins of Minitel. A very simple way to think about this is if you were inclined to run a bulletin board system in the US, you could only have other people come onto your system who also had computers and modems, which is a pretty small population overall. Whereas in France, there is the possibility of making a dial-up bulletin board system compatible with Minitel terminals. So you could run a small service off of the Minitel network,

but still have people's Minitel use their terminals to access your system. And those would be invisible to the state. And those are harder to research in some ways, but the people who worked in them, their memories are very vivid. And so there is a lot of interesting material, and this is kind of coming out of this hobbyist community. So we're really interested in talking to anybody who is involved in those kinds of services. Yeah.

And then on my own, like in a, in the next year, year and a half, I'll have a book coming out about dial up bulletin boards in North America. That's very much in the same spirit as Minitel welcome to the internet. So hopefully some folks who read the book Julian and I worked on will be interested in that book. Do you have anything to add, Julian? No, I mean the other thing on my end, I'm doing

policy work on equality because it is a topic that is being debated. And so I'm impressed of putting together new work that does

use the Minita experience and the experience of the 80s in the U.S. with its computer networks to help think that what the future of net neutrality could be and help debug a lot of the

arguments that you hear from the ISPs in the US and Republican politicians who tend to argue that any sort of state involvement will be the end of the internet. I think the Minutah provides a very good counter argument saying that sometimes state involvement can actually catalyze a very vivid, very active private industry of entrepreneurs who are creating content. And state involvement can be good when it protects things like privacy and neutrality. And I think the most example of the case study to debunk the ISP's claim. Very cool. Well, I know I look

forward to reading or hearing anything from either of you in the future. So, thanks so much for coming on to Advent of Computing. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks very much for the invitation. Thanks for listening to Adren of Computing. I'll be back with a full episode next week, which should be on something a little bit spooky to get in the spirit of Halloween.

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