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A friend showed me Minitel in 1994, and I was half-surprised, half-not-surprised that even on this entirely text-based system, there was still porn (or at least, "visual erotica"). Human nature, eh?


The so-called "Minitel Rose" (all the erotica chat services) services were a cash cow for France Telecom, bringing in billions every year.

Xavier Niel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel) started his empire with a sex oriented chat service.


Billions might be a little oversized.


It's close if you count it in francs, and include all services. This article [0] says that France Telecome gave 700 M FRF to the operators, which means that 1,050 M FRF were collected in 1986 alone.

[0]

https://www.nouvelobs.com/tech/20170804.OBS3007/l-age-d-or-d...


According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel :

In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million ($1,121 million) of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.




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