from our correspondent
PARIS «Comédies françaises» by Eric Reinhardt: that is how France, which was one step away from creating the Internet, found itself with the Minitel. These are the days of the traditional “rentrée littéraire”, the period of the year when the largest number of books (over 500) are published in France, and one of the most interesting titles concerns one of the key moments in the technological race between Europe and America. «In 2013, I came across a short piece of news from Release in which it was announced that a French engineer, Louis Pouzin, was about to be awarded by the Queen of England for having been “One of the fathers of the Internet“. I said to myself, “what is this?” I knew the internet was the genius invention of the Arpanet Americans. What did a French engineer have to do with it? ».
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The French Minitel–
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Reinhardt researched, and discovered that Louis Pouzin had indeed invented in the early 1970s. the datagram, a system for transferring electronic data in packets. The idea behind the Internet. The world today would be different if the French government had supported and encouraged Pouzin. Instead, in 1974, the entourage of the presidente Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, having just arrived at the Elysée with the promise of modernizing France, he discarded Pouzin’s research and he preferred to finance the experiments that would lead to the Minitel, the autarchic and primitive version of the Internet, a kind of network confined within national borders, useful for train timetables, telephone directories, erotic messages and little more.
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It was not an innocent mistake. The protagonist of Reinhardt’s novel is a young journalist fromAfp, Dimitri Marguerite, who investigates that sensational mistake caused by the maneuvers of Ambroise Roux, a character who really existed. Roux was the head of the CGE (forerunner of Alcatel Alstom) and was nicknamed “the godfather of business” to indicate the enormous network of influence he had managed to create, capable of reaching even the Elysée. Pouzin proposed that marriage between information technology and telecommunications which would have been at the origin of the Internet and the planetary fortune of Silicon Valley; he found on his way that set of business and relationship capitalism, blindness and inability to take risks, which are part of the caricature of the Old Continent and unfortunately also of reality. Reinhard met Louis Pouzin and then, twice, Maurice Allègre, a senior civil servant in the 1970s who was general delegate to information technology. Both have identified in the powerful Ambroise Roux the man who – for personal interest and protection of friends involved in the Minitel project – convinced President Giscard d’Estaing to renounce the European “Unidata” project, which would have deprived Americans of the future leadership on the Internet. Pending the Italian translation, «Comédies françaises» is a candidate to be among the favorites of the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize. Reinhardt’s book is the portrait of the scientific excellence of individuals in Europe and the inability to enhance them typical of our societies.
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23 August 2020 (change 23 August 2020 | 18:05)
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