Did the humble Minitel inspire Apple’s Jobs?

France Telecom retired its Minitel service on the 30th of June 2012, and the announcement caused nostalgic regret to many Frenchmen. Had Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)'s Steve Jobs been alive today, he would probably too have mourned the demise of the clunky table-top gadget that was a forerunner of today’s always-on internet-based devices.

Introduced in the days before the Internet, or the World Wide Web, the Minitel was an online video-cum-text service that a customer could access through phone lines, and the result of experiments in 1978 and 1982 by France’s PTT (Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications). It...