Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web
A couple historical anecdotes:<p>There was the equivalent of the hug of death multiple times every year when students were checking their results, overloading the servers as (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people tried to furiously dial in simultaneously to get results from various nationwide exams such as the infamous Baccalauréat.<p>In 1981 for the presidential elections, the result was broadcasted live on the Minitel and showed up live on the news:<p>(On TV) <a href="https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao</a><p>(Remastered Minitel output) <a href="https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I</a><p>The Minitel was such a national pride that the Internet had a hard time piercing through the habits and the collective mind, setting back France by a couple of years on that front. Said misplaced pride is also very visible on some other bad decision making such as forcefully applying national preference to technology such as Bull computers in the enterprise or Thomson TO7&MO5 in schools which were ripped apart by the competition nonetheless. This behavior is still visible today as the government tried to push for "the French Cloud" by heavily subsidizing software such as a poor alternative to Dropbox which became Orange Cloud or looking the other way when Deezer was clearly violating IP rights by padding its music catalogue as it was missing deals from the majors. Same goes with banks shunning Apple/Android Pay in favor of being hell-bent on that sad sad Paylib thing, and various other similar heavy cases of NIH. I'm tentatively hopeful but very cautions about that "French SV" thing. Wait&see.