[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[John R. Levine]

> Well, don't people in France ever want to look up numbers in Germany,
> England, and Italy?

Perhaps, but historically the way that worked is that each national telco 
had operators in a room full of out of date foreign phone books.  I doubt 
any of the telcos would have found that compelling.

> Also, there were lots of other apps on top of Minitel, including a dating
> service! It did replace calls for directory assistance, but then people
> discovered it could do a lot of other things, too.

Yes, I know.  In our 1995 Internet Secrets, we had a chapter on Minitel 
Rose.  It apparently made France Telecom a lot of money since users paid 
by the minute, but I think they were kind of embarassed by the whole 
thing.

It is a reasonable question why other PTTs didn't just clone Minitel, but 
I don't think at the time there would have been much incentive to hook 
them together.  Apparently they did trials in Belgium and Ireland, but 
without the PTT subsidy to provide the terminals for free, they didn't go 
anywhere.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly