"Starving piranhas, no bonjour, no pleasantries, it was direct and crude."

Crude starving piranhas? Is it French cybersex, or the comments section at Chipped Kitchen Table Formica?

At any rate, the Minitel is obsolete.

Long live the Minitel.

France says farewell to the Minitel – the little box that connected a country, by Angelique Chrisafis (Guardian)

• Precursor to internet now redundant after 30 years
• Chunky terminals popular for cybersex and accounts

It is known as the "Little French Box", a 1980s design classic now seen as the ultimate in beige plastic kitsch. But once it was an audacious precursor to the world wide web, introduced the first cybersex into people's living rooms and had a user-friendly design that may have inspired Steve Jobs's first Macintosh computer.

Yet, on Saturday, the plug will finally be pulled on the Minitel machine, France's one-time pride and joy, 30 years after its launch ...

... The longer users stayed online messaging, the more the service providers made.

The musician Gerome Nox recently told the newspaper Libération how he had worked on one of the services posing as a hostess called Julie to attract men and keep them online as long as possible. He compared the men replying to his messages to "starving piranhas, no bonjour, no pleasantries, it was direct and crude". He said he decided to stop as "my Julie had become more and more disagreeable and hateful".

He unmasked himself, typing: "I'm not called Julie. I'm a man, just here to rack up your phone bill. You've been screwed, which was just what you wanted all along." He was fired.