Peter wrote:
Well, America had Compu$erve which did a similar job, but much bigger.
And America Online (later known as AOL) and …
What America did much better than Europe (most importantly because they broke up their Bell system in early 80ies while it took a decade longer to brake up the national telco monopolies across Europe) is separating network, hardware and software.
BTX – and I believe Minitel as well – could only be used with BTX-Hardware on the DATEX-J network provided by Telekom. As in all such situation that was quite detrimental to innovation as ideas in software are always slowed down by “but our hardware does not support” and vice versa.
LeSving wrote:
ell, mobile telephone technology. NMT was the first fully automatic system, the first generation (1G)
The UK could have been first – there is a TV clip of a demonstration of a prototype fully automatic mobile phone developed in the UK, but the TV presenter at the end laments something like “but the problems are not technological, but bureaucratic: the GPO will not allow the radio spectrum to be used this way and it seems like there is no way forward”…
Things have got better since (fortunately), but we still don’t get the “nice things” in the UK – e.g. in amateur radio we are limited to 400W and cannot use amateur radio bands airborne, but in the USA you get 1500W and you can use the amateur bands airborne (so things like amateur rocketry, aero modelling, and high altitude balloons can be done by radio amateurs – in the UK for airborne telemetry we have to make do with the ISM bands and the piddly allowed amounts of power, and can’t legally build our own radios). Even for moon bounce, where some UK amateurs asked for a notice of variation to get more Tx power for one specific event, Ofcom simply said “nope” (moon bounce is hard enough and the extra 6dB power would help).
The European “can’t do” attitude is absolutely pervasive in all areas of life.
Since we’ve gone down this rathole… GSM was developed in France, at the France Telecom research lab in Brittany whose name temporarily escapes me. It was then made a European standard by ETSI, the European Telecoms Standards Institute based at Sophia Antipolis near Nice in France. As LeSving comments, the US refused to adopt some nasty European thing and (thanks to Motorola) stuck with an analog(ue) system until 3G came along in the early 2000s.
The standards (NMT, 3G, 4G/LTE, 5G…) are still managed by something called 3GPP which is administered by ETSI, although the membership is fully international. 3G uses a coding technique (i.e. converting bits into wiggly waves and vice versa) partly developed by Qualcomm in the US. 5G uses a Chinese-developed coding technique.
ETSI remains the dominant force in telecom standards – the “official” body, ITU-T (formerly CCITT), based in Geneva, doesn’t seem to produce very much these days, though that’s where X.25 came from (along with my favourite, L.2, Preservation of Telegraph Poles). Standards for computer networks are mostly managed by IETF, which was originally a US thing but now hardly ever meets in the US (or met, back when travel was a thing) due to the insane visa requirements there especially for Chinese citizens. But they happen in other places too – HTTP/HTML are managed by the WWW Consortium (W3C). Javascript/Ecmascript is managed by ECMA (Geneva). And so on.
All this stuff was the centre of my professional life for a long time. My wife is still heavily involved in it.
johnh wrote:
GSM was developed in France, at the France Telecom research lab in Brittany whose name temporarily escapes me
Not really – it was actually a major part of the success of GSM that it was not developed by one European country individually but from the very beginning a CEPT initiative and only later transferred to ETSI (or ETSI grew out of CEPT – don’t remember that well…).
The basic technology came out of CNET (remembered now). CEPT – the precursor to ETSI although it does still exist as a sort of secretive cabal – adopted the technology when it created an initiative for mobile telephony. Of course everybody was terribly politically correct about it – if it was declared as French technology then Germany etc couldn’t possibly adopt it. (Shades of the AZ vaccine, nothing changes).
Jujupilote wrote:
I am proud to have witnessed the Minitel in action when I was young
I was there
Me too. I remember using it at several French airports at the time.
Peter wrote:
Well, America had Compu$erve which did a similar job, but much bigger. It went back to well before my time on it (which was c. 1990), and dial-up modems go back a long way before that.
Well, my logon was 100040,307. So number 40 in Switzerland as I was told then. I kept the account until they closed.
The interesting bit is: Compuserve was a kind of mini-internet all by itself. Most of what you can find on the net today in glossy colours was there in concise format which worked fine on a 2400 line, later 9600. At first, all was in a kind of terminal window, later we hat CIM (Compuserve Information Manager) which existed as DOSCIM and WINCIM.
Many of the people I go back years and years with originated from that environment. We had AVSIG (aviation forum) where I met people like Randy Sohn and John Deakin, amongst many others, we had FS Forum and later Simgames, which became Simpilot forum, which, after we left Compuserve, eventually became the base for the Aviation Herald. People like Bruce Artwick and Stu Moment were online there and available for contact…. I also was active in some history forums where I still have friends until today.
Those who were mods or sysadmins had access to the Walhalla of Compuserve’s forum system, the sysop forum informally called “School”. I learnt a lot about moderating in there. It was also there, where decisions about to be or not to be were taken, never very lightly, as being locked out meant pretty much your online presence was toast.
I think it was a great time. And sometimes I miss the rules CSI had which forced everyone to be quite civil and could get you into real existential trouble (such as loosing contact to the online world for good) if you misbehaved too badly, so not many did. Many of the principles of “no personal attacks” e.t.c. which are now cornerstones of each forum rulebook, stem from that time.
Things went south fast when CSI introduced Sprint Mosaic, the first real internet browser in that world. It later was bought and became Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Yea, I was there to see it. I bought my first modem at Best Buys in Champaign IL, while visiting with the sublogic crowd who made flight simulator and later ATP and starting scenery design of my own with the legendary Michael Woodley (the designer of the “European Tour” Scenery disk, which made Flightsimulator 2 fly in Europe for the first time, a close friend until today.
johnh wrote:
if it was declared as French technology
Need to do some research on the weekend – but as I remember that is simply not true!
The radio side was mainly driven by the French but the mastermind behind the Network was a guy from the Nordics (Fin or Norwegian). There was also a major team in UK behind it but I do not remember their contribution.
On the political side it was an effort driven by many, but France Germany and I think Italy had a leading role.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The interesting bit is: Compuserve was a kind of mini-internet all by itself.
Just as this thread is Pivoting towards a “old guys dwelling in romanticized memory of the times when the internet has not yet been the internet”: Don’t forget about the alternative to Compuserve for the more independent, liberal and freedom seeking ones (at least this is how we felt thought it was more a lack of funds, access to a US credit card or lack of criminal energy to forge one): The lively mailbox-scene around the FidoNet.
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/ \
/|oo \
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_`@/_ \ _
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| (*) | \ ))
______ |__U__| / \//
/ FIDO \ _//|| _\ /
(________) (_/(_|(____/
Malibuflyer wrote:
Not really – it was actually a major part of the success of GSM that it was not developed by one European country individually but from the very beginning a CEPT initiative and only later transferred to ETSI (or ETSI grew out of CEPT – don’t remember that well…).
In any case, the original meaning of the acronym GSM was Groupe Spéciale Mobile. Global System for Mobile communication is an afterthought.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Don’t forget about the alternative to Compuserve for the more independent, liberal and freedom seeking ones (at least this is how we felt thought it was more a lack of funds, access to a US credit card or lack of criminal energy to forge one
Or rather those who were kicked out of both Compuserve and AOL….
BTW, Compuserve had a Swiss office in the early 1990ties and from that moment on, there was no need for a credit card to pay the bills. I know that there was that possibility in Germany too. I also remember fondly when I needed access while on vaccation in Jamaica, Compuserve organized me the dial up there for free for 3 weeks.
As for more independent and freedom seekers: Yes, I remember some of those mailboxes whose main purpose at the time was to trade illegaly copied software, at least in the Flightsim scene.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Just as this thread is Pivoting towards a “old guys dwelling in romanticized memory of the times when the internet has not yet been the internet”
I can honestly say that it was a great time of discovery and I would think there was a lot more quality over quantity. Those people who went through the trouble to get access and who also bothered to learn English and seek out the really good places had access to people and things which today are spread over a million fora over the net which nobody as time to read.
And: There was no spam mail to speak of while mailing was still on the CSI platform. The moment HTML came into it, e-mail became largely as useless as it is now.
Maybe the closest thing in terms of how people deal with each other to that time is in fact this place right here.
