roundtable: Giving terminals away

roundtable: Giving terminals away

Giving terminals away

braman sandra (s-braman@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu)
Fri, 17 Feb 1995 07:02:34 -0600 (CST) 

From: braman sandra <s-braman@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Message-Id: <199502171302.AA00720@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Giving terminals away
To: roundtable@cni.org
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 1995 07:02:34 -0600 (CST)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9502141223.A7722-0100000@idi.net> from "Mary Gardiner Jones" at Feb 16, 95 01:50:08 pm


Re the discussion about giving terminals away -- folks on this list ought 
to know about the French minitel experiment, started in the early 1980 
under the Socialists, which had exactly the intention of that and went 
well towards it.  The idea was both to bring everyone into the system, to 
identify a niche in the global information economy by developing a 
terminal so cheap to produce that it could be exported, and to stimulate 
the emergence of services by putting in the infrastructure. The number of 
services exploded (though many are pornographic), it took a lot longer to 
get the terminals around than projected but now they're about ubiquitous 
-- but the machine isn't exportable and is now quite outdated, for it's 
dumb.  Traps as well as advantages.  

Sandra Braman, U of Illinois
<s-braman@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>

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