I'm speaking under correction here, but I think it's simply that we had no urgent need for the Internet in Europe of the 90s.
All the commercial and communicative things could be done via Videotex family of online services.

And things like fiber glass and Euro ISDN could provide video telephony and instant fax/phone calls just fine (once available).
The Internet was superfluous, so to say. Not really needed, except by universities (which had access to it before the 90s).

In addition, there were third-party online services such as CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy and AOL etc.
Most of them took the role of an ISP in second half of the 90s, too.

But in 1995, when Windows 95 RTM was out, it did neither feature DirectX nor Internet software.
Microsoft rather tried to convince users to join Microsoft Network, as a rival to the internet.

That being said, the internet wasn't entirely unknown either. It just wasn't mainstream.
Internet and the world wide web were rather useful to send international e-mails and to visit personal homepages and university sites.

Commercial stuff, such as home banking, travel booking, sending messages to another user and so on could be done via Minitel style services.
CompuServe was especially popular among IT people and e-mail users, probably due to its age.

If I had to think about it, then I would say than 1996 was the moment when the masses slowly became aware of the www.
That's when books, magazines and TV shows startet to mention http://www sites.

By contrast, the cell phone (w/ digital cells) was known since 1992 or so. It was previously being known as "car phone".
They were so popular, but out of reach that many of the "cool" CB radio operators of the 1970s and 1980s had fake car phones that were CB radios, really.

Here's a list of Videotex services in Europe. It's incomplete, though.
BTX system was available in Austria and Swiss, too. And it was independent from German BTX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex

In Japan, there was a similar system, that didn't use CEPT glyphs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_(videotex)

Speaking of BTX, the Wikipedia article of BTX isn't completely right, it gives an false impression, I think.
BTX was never mainstream, true, but it was no failure by any means, either.

Professionals used it regularly, just not citizens. Travel agencies loved it, for example.
The online banking feature was in use way past 2001. It still worked in late 2000s.

Also, it's false that BTX was only accessible with expensive special hardware.
"Software Decoder" were available, too. Acoustic couplers, DBT-03 or Hayes modems could be used.
In public spaces, BTX terminals with free access were sometimes to be found.

At home, users could test BTX by using guest access (Gastzugang).
It needed no registration and allowed visiting pages that were free of charge.
It merely did cost the normal telephone bills, like a phone call.

What was a bit too pricey was the fee for the regular use of the online service itself.
Users paid per page, which did cost as much as defined by the page provider.

Austria did it better here, overall. In the 80s, they had the MUPID home computers that could run Z80 code (games etc) from BTX etc.

All in all, I often think that Teletext/Videotext was the reason why ordinary citizens had no urgent need for BTX.
News and weather information could be received for free via TV, after all. A back channel wasn't needed by most people, thus.

The exception were home banking and shopping (quelle and otto come to mind), maybe.
And checking for the train delays, share prices, telephone numbers etc.

Another drawback was its slowness and prettiness.
BTX was way more colourful and sophisticated than Minitel and the 1200/75 Baud standard speed was barely adequate.
ISDN with 64 KBit/s was quick enough by far, but not available to most users for a long time.

1995/96 seemed to be the year homes got internet in Australia as well.

I think thats was the reason computers also became popular in homes, before then it wasn't uncommon people were still using 8 bit machines like Apple IIe's if they had anything at all!

Consoles weren't that common either. I can't remember any of my friends owning anything prior to a PS1.

Teletext existed but wasn't widely used. None of our TV's supported it till 2000.

Mobile phones were also really expensive in the mid 90's and if you had one it was the "family mobile" for whoever was going out. Wasn't till late 90's that people started getting individual phones, at least in my circle of friends

I'm not even sure when smalller businesses started getting the internet. Fax would have been more popular and reliable then email I'd of though.

So really everything was still very much offline till the second half of the 90's. In a way I miss the simplicity of those times.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-28, 15:45:

Part of it, I think, is that in the mid-1990s in North America, if not a teeny bit earlier, it became expected to have home comp […]
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Almoststew1990 wrote on 2024-09-25, 20:33:

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

Part of it, I think, is that in the mid-1990s in North America, if not a teeny bit earlier, it became expected to have home computers for kids in school. Certainly teachers here by 1994-5 or so seemed to expect at least some things to be done typed. My class had like... 3 people... without home computers and there were a couple DOS machines in the classroom with WP 5.1 they could use. So, if you were a parent, you bit the bullet, got out the credit card, and got the first family PC (or Mac Performa) with the inkjet printer.

The other thing that drove interest in home computers, as quaint as this now sounds in 2024, was the CD-ROM encyclopedia. Prior to the CD-ROM encylopedia, you were heading to the public library half-regularly for all kinds of school work just to consult a paper encyclopedia. CD-ROM encyclopedia meant the same thing could be done without leaving home, a huge time saver for parents. Or you were spending big money for a printed encyclopedia set at home - the cost of that probably made computers look cheap.

I would note that this was all pre-Internet, people started to play around with dial-up in 1996-7. Americans were probably 'online' before Canadians thanks to things like unlimited AOL; there were no comparably-priced services in Canada that I remember. But that meant most computers had modems which made the leap to accessing the Internet rather easy.

Meanwhile, when I was in France in 1997, almost no one had home computers, and I'm pretty sure teachers there were expecting handwritten work to be handed in. Knowing how conservative teachers there could be, wouldn't be surprised if they'd be upset getting something typed instead. In France at least, I think mainstream home computers only became a thing in the later 1990s as they woke up and were like 'OMG the anglosaxons are way ahead of us on this Internet thing'. In two months spent there over the summer, not a single person my family visited had Internet access - my mom had one techie friend (who had in fact spent a lot of time in North America before moving back), and his hardware had gotten fried in a lightning strike the week before, and everybody else had basically never heard of the Internet. Minitel country, it still was. (And it's worth noting, Minitel was a lot cooler than anything in Canada in the early 1990s... but it caused them to be very behind on PCs, TCP/IP, the web, etc)

We had Bell's Alex in Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(videotex_service)

I don't recall ever seeing one in operation (maybe there were demo at Bell boutiques/stores, but I don't remember), but I do recall seeing either a boxed one (or the repurposed cardboard box that used to contain one) on a shelf in the CEGEP that I was attending, some time in the 1994-1996 timeframe.

I think I saw one of those Alex terminals in the thrift a while back, but though it was for one of those deaf services.

darry wrote on 2024-10-04, 23:31:

We had Bell's Alex in Canada. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(videotex_service) […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-28, 15:45:

Part of it, I think, is that in the mid-1990s in North America, if not a teeny bit earlier, it became expected to have home comp […]
Show full quote

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2024-09-25, 20:33:

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

Part of it, I think, is that in the mid-1990s in North America, if not a teeny bit earlier, it became expected to have home computers for kids in school. Certainly teachers here by 1994-5 or so seemed to expect at least some things to be done typed. My class had like... 3 people... without home computers and there were a couple DOS machines in the classroom with WP 5.1 they could use. So, if you were a parent, you bit the bullet, got out the credit card, and got the first family PC (or Mac Performa) with the inkjet printer.

The other thing that drove interest in home computers, as quaint as this now sounds in 2024, was the CD-ROM encyclopedia. Prior to the CD-ROM encylopedia, you were heading to the public library half-regularly for all kinds of school work just to consult a paper encyclopedia. CD-ROM encyclopedia meant the same thing could be done without leaving home, a huge time saver for parents. Or you were spending big money for a printed encyclopedia set at home - the cost of that probably made computers look cheap.

I would note that this was all pre-Internet, people started to play around with dial-up in 1996-7. Americans were probably 'online' before Canadians thanks to things like unlimited AOL; there were no comparably-priced services in Canada that I remember. But that meant most computers had modems which made the leap to accessing the Internet rather easy.

Meanwhile, when I was in France in 1997, almost no one had home computers, and I'm pretty sure teachers there were expecting handwritten work to be handed in. Knowing how conservative teachers there could be, wouldn't be surprised if they'd be upset getting something typed instead. In France at least, I think mainstream home computers only became a thing in the later 1990s as they woke up and were like 'OMG the anglosaxons are way ahead of us on this Internet thing'. In two months spent there over the summer, not a single person my family visited had Internet access - my mom had one techie friend (who had in fact spent a lot of time in North America before moving back), and his hardware had gotten fried in a lightning strike the week before, and everybody else had basically never heard of the Internet. Minitel country, it still was. (And it's worth noting, Minitel was a lot cooler than anything in Canada in the early 1990s... but it caused them to be very behind on PCs, TCP/IP, the web, etc)

We had Bell's Alex in Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(videotex_service)

I don't recall ever seeing one in operation (maybe there were demo at Bell boutiques/stores, but I don't remember), but I do recall seeing either a boxed one (or the repurposed cardboard box that used to contain one) on a shelf in the CEGEP that I was attending, some time in the 1994-1996 timeframe.

I have a vague recollection of seeing one (or a reference to one) at the back of a Bell store in the early 1990s, but that's about it...

I don't think you can compare that to Minitel though. I don't know how many people whose family members didn't work for Bell ever saw an Alex; Minitel had actual penetration. TV ads, billboards, etc in 1991 would say "3615 WHATEVER" (3615 was one of the Minitel prefixes) the same way everything has www.whatever.ca or www.whatever.com nowadays. Wikipedia says that in 1999, there were 9 million Minitel terminals in the field. Who knows if that was peak Minitel or if peak Minitel was a few years earlier. Meanwhile they seem to suggest that peak number of Alex devices was 32,000.

One thing that contributed to Minitel's success is that French consumers, used to paying for local calls and not used to toll-free numbers (it's interesting - things that are toll-free in North America are extra-cost numbers in France, e.g. bank customer service numbers), were quite comfortable paying the fairly hefty rates for Minitel services. I don't think Canadians ever were - things like CompuServe, etc were also quite rare in the days of their high hourly rates.

Also, it's worth noting residential ISDN was also a complete flop in Canada (whereas it was quite successful in various European countries), I think for the same reason - Bell priced residential ISDN on a per-minute basis, analog calls were flat-rate for local, the end. And cell phones in Canada were far less popular than in other countries until you started to get much closer to unlimited voice plans...

Hi, as far as I remember the Minitel devices could have been rented for little money.
So it was as uncomplicated as renting a landline telephone in the years before.

What also has been popular were these pink pages on the Minitel (Teletel) service.
They basically were erotic pages, with chat rooms, lonely hearts ads and so on.

I've read somewhere that young students, boys, had worked as animatrices there.
They acted as teasing young girls, to break the ice and to get things going..

Ah, yes, the French.. 😄 ❤️

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/j … e-says-farewell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7FFOgcKgf4

Old ISA/VLB/PCI hardware dried up after year 2000 in Silicon Valley.
Amazing how quickly it gone.
In just 10 years it’s been recycled or distroyed.