The Shamrock & Fleur must have been over seventy years old, at least. Built in the late 1970s, this express postal liner saw its second life begin in 2031, when A Post identified it as a key asset suitable for immediate refurbishment and repurposing. Originally meant to be scrapped in 2023, its demise had been delayed due to a lack of funds, and the Pulse had been blessing: suddenly, an aging ferry well used to carry cars and passengers across the Irish Sea had become uniquely fitted for becoming the primary way to deliver mail and other goods from Ireland to France and vice versa. And a few passengers, of course, but only those who really needed to get to France for business or real-life necessity.

Fae arrived earlier than she was supposed to – as she always did when she had to do something important, a purely British trait she got from her mother – and had been waiting for her little brother for over an hour. She had time to double-check that the tickets were in order, that the time of boarding was right, and she even had the unique chance of chatting to a middle-aged dock worker from Peru, who was delighted to tell the young woman everything about his life, how he ended up stuck in Ireland after the Pulse, and how much he enjoyed his simpler life, mostly refueling ships and loading cargo. He told her how the country’s cold December weather was a real problem for the rapeseed oil they used on the liners, as it was at high risk to thicken and become like gel due to the low temperatures. For this reason, they had to constantly keep the fuel heated (which would seem a contradiction to most people not familiar with the process), which resulted in an even stronger smell of cooking oil.

Fae was among the first passengers who entered a large repurposed cargo shed, which was used for both loading and boarding operations at the same time. As the time of departure approached, more and more people started queueing behind Fae, in a specific area of the shed cordoned off with a rope.

“Hey sys! Thank you for saving me a spot!” shouted Finn as he entered the shed, making sure that everyone in the now fairly long queue of passengers waiting to board heard him and understood that he was not skipping the queue, but only joining his sister at the very start of it.

“I am sorry. I know I am late, but… well, I went out with Aisling last night as this was my last night in Ireland, so you can imagine. I didn’t sleep much, and she enjoys a full Irish in the morning on weekends, so…” continued Finn, at risk of oversharing.

“You must be señor Finn! Good morning!” A voice said with a strong Spanish accent. That was Pedro, the dock worker who essentially made friends with Fae. “She’s nearly ready, I promise. The ship! Of course, la señorita Fae has been ready to board for an hour now! Jejeje!” He laughed loudly, clearly enjoying the fact that Finn turned up much later than his sister and he probably had a great time the night before.

In a few minutes, the old engine of the old liner started roaring, and the smell of cooking oil became even stronger, coming through the large open windows. Fae felt a bit nauseated: she never liked waiting at fish and chippers, and this felt ten times worse.

Finally, they started boarding procedures while simultaneously loading the goods and mail. Fae and Finn were instructed to approach a large desk, where some security guards assisted an An Post employee with the routine inspections of the passengers and their belongings. Luckily, Fae proactively filled in both her and her brother’s declaration forms, making sure she listed in particular all the valuables they were carrying as currency for the trip (which was fairly common practice for international travels), her DigiBook, cassette tape recorder, and Finn’s Polaroid camera.

Being the first to go through, they were obviously asked to open the luggage for inspection. Fae immediately handed over her DigiBook, which was passed on to one of the security guards who seemed tasked to verify that electronics were properly licensed and in order. She quickly examined all sides of the DigiBook checking for signs of tampering, and asked Fae to turn it on and insert her DigiCard. Everything checked out, of course, as the system booted normally through the EDS firmware.

“What’s in that box?” asked one of the security guards.

“Spare batteries for my tape recorder,” replied Fae promptly as the guard proceeded to open the box to see if anything else was added inside. Fae immediately remembered that the microfilm that was hidden in one of the batteries was probably lighter than an ordinary AA battery, and she froze as the guard shifted some of the batteries in the box to see if there wasn’t anything inside. Luckily, he didn’t notice and moved on.

The box containing the films for Finn’s camera was checked as well, but luckily the microfilm looked and weighted almost exactly like an ordinary camera film, so everything went smoothly.

Once their passports and tickets were checked, they were admitted on board and told that cabin 57 had been assigned to them. They walked through the narrow corridors of the liner as the crew was clearing out the passengers areas after the final preparations and cleanup before departure, and they finally reached their room. It was a small, rather cramped squarish box of metal with two small round portholes on the starboard side of the ship, a bunk bed, a tiny desk, a couple of chairs, and a rather small cabinet. It would have been perfectly fine for one person, but it definitely felt a bit too small for two. The siblings however weren’t that fussed: that was it, they were on the way to Italy!

It took just over an hour to let everyone aboard and load all the cargo. Still filled with adrenaline about the journey that was about to begin, Fae and Finn decided to do some exploring of the ship just before departure: they were both very curious of the new environment, and they also wanted to be prepared and know as much as they could about the ship, its crew, and the passengers.

They counted around sixty passengers in the queue, and they estimated probably around thirty or forty crew members, including security guards and galley personnel. December was not a busy month, and liners like the Shamrock and Fleur would have loaded significantly more cargo than passenger. While in the summer month you would find the occasional tourists that could afford the trip for leisure, people who chose to travel in the winter did so because they didn’t have a choice on the matter.

There were essentially three main groups of people aboard: merchants who needed to travel to France because of their trade, probably along with their goods, young workers emigrating because of better job conditions (France was booming compared to Ireland at the time, and especially the railway infrastructure was undergoing a massive expansion), and a few older couples visiting their families on the continent. There were essentially no families or children, maybe two or three, not more.

There wasn’t much to do on the ship, really, especially at that time of the year when it was going to be too cold to stay on deck. The main recreational facility was the bar and canteen area: Finn could notice quite a few different beer and cider taps behind the counter, eight big long tables that were going to be used by the passengers during scheduled meals, and some traces of games like a dartboard on the wall, boxes of board games stacked next to some books and newspapers in a corner. As no one was around at that time because crews were busy with departure procedures and passengers were getting settled in their cabins, the sibling moved on to complete the full tour of the ship. The big open deck in the middle of the vessel, that was used to load cars and vehicles in its pre-Pulse glory days, was now full of sacks of mail, pallets, boxes… it was amazing how much stuff was being sent over to France; but again, that was the primary way to do so since planes had been out of the picture for decades.

As they reached their cabin, Fae and Finn could hear the engine roaring loader than before. The overall vibration that they were slowly becoming accustomed to increased as the ship started maneuvering inside the port: they were finally departing! A short, muffled announcement told the passengers that they were about to leave the port and that the passengers were invited to remain in their rooms until they had cleared the port, to facilitate ship operations. With impeccable timing, a strong rain started to pour, making that last request much easier for everyone.

Back in their cabin, Fae decided to turn on her DigiBook briefly to see if she could still download some mail and get some final news report before the radio signal would become to weak, while Finn decided to read something. Except that he realized he didn’t pack any book except for the Paris travel guide that Eric gave him and the xywOS book, made less obvious by an opaque protective sleeve that made its title impossible to read. As usual, her sister handed over to him the two books she borrowed from the library, rolling her eyes: once more she was the one that did all the planning, exactly like her mother.

While Finn was initially intrigued by After the Silence, he decided to go for a hopefully slightly lighter reading, so he picked up the other book instead, and got lost inside it pretty quickly.

---

I did not set out to write a love letter to a telephone terminal.

When my editor at Le Progrès first suggested I document the rebirth of the Minitel network for a general audience, I was not enthusiastic. I had spent the better part of my career covering the human cost of the Pulse: the hospitals without power, the bridges without lights, the winters of the early years, and the idea of reinventing myself to write about a government computing initiative felt, at best, a distraction. At worst, it felt like overly nationalistic propaganda.

I was wrong.

To understand why Nouveau Minitel matters, you must first understand what the Pulse took from France, and the French, rather. Not the cars, not the lights, not even the hospitals – though all of those losses were devastating, of course. What the Pulse truly destroyed, in a single instant on a May morning, was the invisible fabric of daily communication that most of us had ceased to notice at all and took for granted: we did not know we were utterly dependent on it until it was gone.

I was thirty-one years old that morning, working from my apartment in Lyon, on the phone to a colleague in Paris. The call ended mid-sentence. It simply stopped, because the very concept of telephone calls had ceased to exist, in a single instant.

What followed, the Hard Years, as they came to be known, is not the subject of this book. What is relevant here is a peculiar fact that became apparent only gradually, over months and then years of painstaking reconstruction: unlike other countries in Europe (or what was left of them), France was not starting from nothing.

The original Minitel, which had been marketed as Télétel when it first appeared in 1982, was the product of a France that distrusted the coming dominance of American computing and resolved to build its own answer. The Direction Générale des Télécommunications, a body not known for bold thinking, did something genuinely radical: it gave away the terminals for free. Or rather, it rented them, at negligible cost, to anyone who wanted one, betting that universal access would create the services that justified universal access. The bet, against all possible odds, quickly paid off.

For nearly twenty years, Minitel was France’s digital life: you could look up train timetables, read the weather, place classified advertisements, chat with strangers in the infamous messageries roses, search for a telephone number, order flowers, pay a bill, or check a bank balance… everything through a cream-coloured terminal that was the size of a small typewriter, communicating at 1,200 bits per second downstream and 75 bits per second upstream over the ordinary telephone line in your home. Yes, you read that right, bits, with the leading M that would make that peak of pre-Pulse network speed: Minitel was exactly a thousand times slower than gigabit-plus Internet!

At the time, those speeds were sufficient for everything anyone needed to do. The internet eventually killed Minitel, of course. The service was formally decommissioned in June 2012. Many people I interviewed for this book described the announcement with a shrug; by then, Minitel had become a curiosity, a relic, something your grandparents used to check train times before the web made it obsolete. The terminals went into attics, forgotten, but luckily for us the copper telephone lines remained, buried under city streets, humming quietly with nothing much to say.

When the Pulse arrived thirteen years later, the copper lines were still there.

This is the fact that changes everything, and I want to dwell on it. The E1 component of our well-known high-altitude electromagnetic pulse destroyed integrated circuits. Not all of them, mind, just the most complex ones (which sadly were ubiquitous in everything we used before the Pulse). What the E1 did not destroy, at least not reliably, was passive infrastructure. A copper wire is a copper wire: a cable buried a meter underground and terminated at both ends with nothing more complex than a mechanical relay is, in practical terms, invisible to an electromagnetic pulse.

Our telephone network, the same network that had carried Minitel traffic for twenty years before being repurposed for broadband, survived the Pulse largely intact.

The bonus part was that even most of the terminals like the Minitel 1 and 1B did not get destroyed, as they relied on a mere Intel 8032 or 8052 processors to work. Those are fairly simple, 8-bit processors from the 1980s.

And France, uniquely among the major European nations, had a generation of engineers who remembered in precise technical detail how a national text-based network was supposed to work. Some of them were retired; some of them were very old. All of them, it turned out, were willing to explain.

The broad outline is this: by the early 2030s, several regional telephone authorities had independently begun restoring local exchange service using surviving electromechanical equipment and newly-manufactured terminals based on the same, resilient, microprocessors . These regional efforts were fragmented, incompatible with one another, and dependent entirely on the enthusiasm of a small number of individuals who had the relevant knowledge and access to salvaged components.

The Lyon Accords of 2032 changed this. Among the many provisions of that agreement was a mandate for member nations to establish state-supervised digital infrastructure suitable for civilian use. For France, the response was the creation of the Société des Systèmes Logiques (SSL) and the formal commission of what would become the Nouveau Minitel. The decision to revive the Minitel model specifically, rather than attempt something new, was made for reasons that are both pragmatic and, I dare say, quietly philosophical. Pragmatically, the model simply worked: its architecture was know, its constraints (text-based services, modest bandwidth, a fixed set of service codes, centralized routing over copper lines) were not failures to be corrected, but features to be respected. A network designed for 1,200 baud does not demand processors that do not yet exist. A display standard built around forty columns and twenty-four rows of alphanumeric characters can be implemented on hardware that any competent technician can build and repair.

Minitel was not the Internet. It was never meant to be; and in 2032, that was precisely its virtue.

Philosophically, there was something important, I think, in the act of reaching backward to move forward. The Pulse had been, among other things, a catastrophic demonstration of what happens when a civilization loses the ability to understand or repair its own infrastructure.

Nouveau Minitel, by contrast, was built to be understood: its terminals have fewer than forty components, the service protocol can be described in thirty pages, the line encoding is printed in a manual that SSL distributes free of charge. When something breaks, and things always break, a technician trained for a week can identify the fault and correct it.

Since the first edition of this book appeared, Nouveau Minitel has expanded beyond what even its architects anticipated. The network now connects every metropolitan commune in France, with rural coverage approaching ninety percent in most regions.

Terminals have been issued (and subsidized, like in the past) to households, schools, post offices, pharmacies, public libraries… essentially everywhere. Services now include regional news, agricultural price indices, medical appointment booking, municipal record requests, rail and coach timetables for the entire national network, and several thousand commercial and community services registered under the familiar five-digit code system.

Direct payment is also possible from any terminal, debited through the subscriber account associated with the household line. This is not a clever invention, it is a mechanism so similar to the original Minitel billing system that the engineers who designed it in 2034 have admitted, with some amusement, that they essentially reimplemented something that had existed fifty years before.

What Nouveau Minitel is not, and what I think it is important to say plainly, is a replacement for what was lost. The Internet that existed before the Pulse carried more information in a single second than Nouveau Minitel carries in a day.

The people who built the old internet built something extraordinary, and its loss was a tragedy from which we have not recovered and may not fully recover in my lifetime. But the network described in this book is real, and it is working, and it connects people who would otherwise have no connection at all. On a Tuesday afternoon last spring, I sat in a post office in a village in the Ardèche and watched an elderly farmer consult the next day’s weather forecast for his valley, check the current price of wool at the Lyon exchange, and send a message to his daughter in Clermont-Ferrand, all through a terminal no more complicated than the one his mother had used to look up telephone numbers forty years before. He did not find this remarkable: it was simply how things worked now. Of course, I found it remarkable enough for both of us.

This second edition incorporates corrections to several technical passages in chapters four and seven, where the first edition’s description of the X.25 packet-switching layer over twisted-pair copper contained inaccuracies that a number of patient engineers were good enough to point out in writing. I am grateful to them.

I am also grateful to Mathieu Courtois at SSL documentation office in Rennes, to the late Hélène Vautrin whose recollections of the original Télétel project were invaluable, and to my editor Sandrine, who has now read this manuscript more times than any person should be asked to read anything.

The network is imperfect. The terminals are slow. The services are limited in ways that would have seemed provincial even by the standards of 1995.

But none of that changes what it means to be connected again, after years of silence.

Jules Biénot, Villefranche-sur-Saône, October 2043