He is more than a businessman-philosopher, he is a student of history who believes passionately in the Socratic dialogue and radical transparency which he instilled in the culture of Bridgewater. Post College in 1971 and Harvard Business school in 1973) and longtime CEO until he gave up that position to become Co-chief Investment Officer and Co-chairman. Dalio is the founder, (he started the firm out of his apartment in 1975 after graduating from C.W. "I have a little table with my Minitel, my telephone and my answering-machine.Ray Dalio is a world-class, macro-economic investor who built the largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater Associates, managing more than $150 billion dollars. "I use it several times a week to consult my accounts," she said. Older people, like Claudette, 80, say they will be devastated when they lose their little terminals. There is a Facebook group calling for a "return to the Minitel". To all but the stubborn French, the future of information technology was personal computers linked, internationally, by the servers and search engines which created the web.Įven today, some French people still insist on the superiority of Minitel over the internet.
By the 1990s, the internet was on the way. The US took a great interest in the French invention in the 1980s but declined to buy it. On the US system, it could take six minutes for a single page to appear on the screen.īut France never managed to sell the Minitel technology abroad. But none of these systems were as comprehensive or effective as Minitel. There was Ceefax in Britain and NAPLPS in the United States. Minitel had rivals in other countries, even before the internet spread around the globe. They received exclusive rights to set up lucrative Minitel services, including the Minitel Rose, after complaining that the dull little consoles appearing in every home in France would be the "death of print culture". It is less known that beneficiaries of this early text-sex were conservative, regional newspapers. And at least one confession.īills run up on Minitel Rose became legendary. The imminent demise of the Minitel has produced a surge of reminiscences on the early days of the service. Access was pay-as-you-go or by subscription and – especially in the case of the sex lines on the "Minitel Rose" or "pink Minitel" – could be very expensive. They could only call up the addresses of the 25,000 or more services officially affiliated to the system. They could not randomly "search" the network. They could not analyse or store information. There was even an abbreviated Minitel language, rather like "text speak", such as "slt, té ki?" (salut, qui es- tu or hello, who are you?)īut Minitel, compared with the web, had many limitations. Minitel had chat lines where people could commentate on world events, or their own lives, long before the blogosphere.
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The Minitel terminal – provided free to subscribers – was the first screen-and-keyboard combination widely available in any country. The Minitel was the world's first large data base accessible to the public.
Either way, Minitel itself proved to be a kind of "Neanderthal" technology – a huge evolutionary advance that was doomed to be swept away by a smarter, more flexible and more aggressive cousin. It has often been argued that the obsession of the French state with the Minitel impeded France's conversion to the internet.