“Long before hundreds of millions of homes worldwide began connecting to the Internet in the 1990s, France’s Minitel box, the steam train of the online world, attracted the attention of Apple Inc’s now deceased founder, Steve Jobs,” Brian Love reports for Reuters.

“The clunky Minitel, pulled out of service at the end of June, was used by some 25 million people in France at the time for services ranging from checking the weather to making travel reservations and posting small ads,” Love reports. “‘He bought one and took it to bits to see how it worked,’ Gerard Thery, one of the Frenchmen behind the 1982 launch of the Minitel system, told business newspaper Economie Matin.”

Read more in the full article here.