Minitel

The Minitel was a videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was invented in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes in Brittany, France. The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980[1] in Saint-Malo, France, and from autumn 1980 in other areas, and introduced commercially throughout France in 1982 by the PTT (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones; divided since 1991 between France Télécom and La Poste).[2] From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web... In 1978, Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones, the French PTT organisation, began designing the Minitel network. By distributing terminals that could access a nationwide electronic directory of telephone and address information, it hoped to increase use of the country's 23 million phone lines, and reduce the costs of printing phone books and employing directory assistance personnel.[6] Millions of terminals were given for free (officially loans, and property of the PTT) to telephone subscribers. At the time, France was undergoing a vision of socialism, where the state would develop high technology for the benefit of its citizens' lives. The TGV high-velocity trains also resulted from this vision... By early 1986 1.4 million terminals were connected to Minitel, with plans to distribute another million by the end of the year. This was met with opposition from newspapers worried about competition from an electronic network... France Télécom estimated that almost 9 million terminals—including web-enabled personal computers (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux)—had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people (of a total population of 60 million). Developed by 10,000 companies, in 1996, almost 26,000 different services were available.[8] Minitel became a great financial success for the PTT, as using the service cost the 2022 equivalent of 30 euro cent per minute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

I think I used one of these in 1988 in Paris, but I can't remember what for....

• back home, I was using Compuserve and Prodigy.