roundtable: Re: Giving terminals away

roundtable: Re: Giving terminals away

Re: Giving terminals away

Jim Burger (burger@apple.com)
Sat, 18 Feb 1995 16:15:47 -0500 

Message-Id: <v01510102ab6c134aecf2@[130.43.50.115]>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 1995 16:15:47 -0500
To: roundtable@cni.org
From: burger@apple.com (Jim Burger)
Subject: Re: Giving terminals away


>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-- but the machine isn't exportable and is now quite outdated, for it's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>


Sandra cites a very good example why we should be very careful about
encouraging corporations to dumping their obselete equipment on those 
who may need easy to use up-to-date reasonably capable equipment to 
access information. Personally, I applaud the goal of universal access 
to information sources such as the Internet. But one has to carefully 
examine all the consequences of each approach to that goal.

Jim Burger
<burger@apple.com>

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