This project started after I discovered you could run a minitel server out of your Atari ST computer, just needing the Minitel1, a free terminal France Telecom was distributing at the time to phone subscribers, and a simple RS232 cable to connect it to the computer.
I got 3”5 floppies2 from other students from ESIGELEC3 with “Einstel” on them, some code I could use to run the server, and I started building my server pages. In no time, “Sook” was born and accepting dial-up calls.
At the time, local calls were not free in France (or Europe in general), differently from North America, but they were still relatively cheap. Yet, you still needed a subscriber phone line for any communication, so I had just gotten a second phone line for the server, which was consequently mostly a mono-server, similar to BBSes in America). People would connect, read, and post, but all interaction was sequential. Some people would stay on the server for hours, and participate in many of the discussion forums. It was limited, but still quite some fun. There were options to handle several phone lines, using special multi-line adapter cards, but this would have started to be a waste of money in my opinion.
I ended shutting down the server when I graduated in 1989.
Internet was in 1994, when I worked at CEGEDIM.
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This was 1989, Internet was not yet a thing, the only world-wide network I could use was during my stage at IBM. In the meantime, we were circulating software on little floppies. From my recollection, my first contact with dial-up ↩
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ESIGELEC was my Electrical Engineering University in Rouen, France. ↩
Alcatel Télic Minitel - CnAM 44045, picture by Rama source: Wikimedia Commons