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"Minitel use peaked in 1993". The closest technology at that time outside France would have been bulletin board services (BBS). Each was run as a separate walled garden but many were linked by Fidonet. So not too dissimilar to Minitel, just more diverse and decentralized.


There was a similar system for minitel: these were called RTC servers. Nothing to do with WebRTC.

It was short for Réseau téléphonique commuté. Basically a simple user would run the equivalent of bbs software on his computer, but with specific tweak that it could talk in videotex encoding.

And then of course he would use a modem (even in hackish ways the modem of an existing Minitel) to answer calls on a normal phone line (no x25 here).

But these rarely did FIDO.




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