New technology

[SteveT]

Class!!!

 

Teletext / ICT / TES

 

Who says teachers have no sense of humour!!!

[DSapseid]

ROFLMAO :doh:

[laserblazer]

I think the ones with a sense of humour go to work on TES.

[powdarrmonkey]

Ha, that's my old boss! (he's a bit of a legend in real life, too.)

[torledo]

apparently the french [who else!!!!] had/have a phenomenally successful videotext based service called minitel, i'd never heard of it before i'd read about it last year, but it's been around for ages in france and even today it appears to hold some advantages for the french who used it a lot;

 

from the minitel wikipedia page

 

Minitel was often considered as an impediment for a fast deployment of the Internet in France, since it already provided safe and easy online access for many useful services without requiring a personal computer. Indeed, it still has advantages over the Internet: It does not require subscribing to a service, buying and maintaining a personal computer, and there are fewer security issues with respect to credit card payments and other personal information. Also, because Minitels follow well-defined standards, there are hardly any compatibility problems

 

so it might not be that tongue-in-cheek to eulogise the benefits of a text-based service.......if we were in france that is. Infact the operational and business model is perhaps years ahead of it's time.

[Andrew_C]

I seem to recall (although I have no idea where I read it) that the French had a fax system some time before the telephone was invented.

[matt40k]

Class!!!

 

Teletext / ICT / TES

 

Who says teachers have no sense of humour!!!

 

ROFL!!!

[srochford]

apparently the french [who else!!!!] had/have a phenomenally successful videotext based service called minitel, i'd never heard of it before i'd read about it last year, but it's been around for ages in france and even today it appears to hold some advantages for the french who used it a lot;

 

so it might not be that tongue-in-cheek to eulogise the benefits of a text-based service.......if we were in france that is. Infact the operational and business model is perhaps years ahead of its time.

 

Key thing about minitel was that the equipment was given out free -this meant it got a really big take up in the early days (wikipedia compares it to Prestel; I'd guess that in terms of technology this is true but in reality Prestel was very poor, often didn't work and had minimal takeup because of the cost)

 

I much prefer text based services; I can read and I don't want the visual distraction that so many other things impose (this site is a good example - essentially most of the content on Edugeek is text but then the whole thing is brought to a crawl by all the pretty gewgaws around the page!)

[powdarrmonkey]

I used minitel a few times, that brings back memories...

 

'Course I was too young to appreciate how incredible it was at the time, but still.

[sidewinder]

Yeah I read about Minitel a while back in one of my random wikipedia afternoons

Quite fascinating and much more advanced than anything we had