🚀 go-pugleaf

This article is from seismo!mcvax!inria!sermage (Philippe Sermage)
 and was received on Mon Sep 15 10:29:31 1986

			[ slightly edited ]
 
All of this is true, except the Minitel is not free everywhere yet.

The telephone administration borrow a mini-terminal instead of a paper
telephon catalog.

You can use the terminal for free the first three minutes, after that 
you have to pay a small fee.  Before that you got the papper telephone 
catalog for free only for a part of the country (a departement: there are 
95 of them in France).  After that there are 3 codes: 3613, 3614, 3615.
The difference between the three numbers is the price and the utilities.

The first one cost about 15 cents for 20 minutes - it is used for information 
about administration.

The second one cost about the same price every 2 minutes.  This is used for 
services like tourism information or mostly a service which is paid in another way
mail selling, short information and so on.

The third cost about 15 cents every 45 seconds 12$ by hour.  With this one you can
spell a lot, take contact under a pseudo with people, ask your bank about your
contos, move money from one to another, do a train, a hotel, a boat, a restaurant
reservation, read news classified advertissements in newspaper database.

That is normal usage but if you want you can open a server - I don't know about 
the price an you get a standard TRANSPAC (French net) code.

For the 3 codes if you're a server then most of them are private and you can sell
subscriptions and give passwords to get in the server after that you do what you 
want.

About the mini-terminal: it's realy mini because three keys are missing: CTRL
ESC, and BREAK.  The screen is 40 columns, 25 lines and the worst is that the 
system TELETEL works in block mode only.

I don't know which computers are used to make the net working.

Last year in June all the systems crashed because of the success, but after a 
summer with limited services it worked again.

If you want more information just tell me - I can try to get it.