There's a certain romance surrounding dorm room startups. From Microsoft, to Dell, to Facebook, there's something about the audacity of building a company before you even get your degree that catches the imagination. The title for the first of the Dot Com dorm room startup probably goes to Tripod, which was founded all the way back in 1992 by Bo Peabody. Bo recounts how Tripod stumbled upon one of the earliest antecedents for what today we would call social media, and gives us an amazing analysis about what it really takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Summary
Today we’re going to talk a bit about alternate Internets. In previous episodes, we have outlined how, going back to the 1970s and 80s, early experiments with networked computing and online services began using a technology called Videotex. So, I wanted to dig deeper into these experiments to look at them as valuable precursors to the world wide web and the modern Internet. It is unlikely, for various technical reasons, that videotex could have evolved systems that could have challenged the modern TCP/IP internet as we know it, but it’s fun to explore these other systems and imagine an alternative net that might have developed. And most interestingly, to me at least, this exercise will allow us to examine Minitel, the French Videotex network that grew to prominence a full decade before the World Wide Web.

Special thanks to Laurent Bristiel @LaurentBristiel for his research assistance on this episode.

The New York Times on the death of the Minitel

This is the Reply All episode about working for a Minitel Rose service