This is Part 4 of our ongoing series “Around the World in 8 Bits,” where we explore how home computing took root across the globe — not just in Silicon Valley or suburban Britain. If you missed the last instalment, check out “Divided by Design: Germany’s Cold War Codebreakers.”
Prologue: Code for the People
It’s 1986 in Orléans. Eleven-year-old Laurence Leclerc crouches beside a Thomson TO7/70, stylus trembling as she draws a butterfly in pixels. The machine hums softly. She’s not in a private lab or a gifted youth programme — she’s in a public classroom, taking part in a grand national experiment.
Her code flutters into animation. The class claps. The teacher nods. In that moment, Laurence isn’t just a student. She’s a citizen of France’s digital future.
France didn’t wait for Silicon Valley. It tried to build its own tech destiny — and did it publicly, proudly, and differently.
From the state-backed classroom machines to a proto-internet in nearly every household, 1980s France imagined technology as a civic good, not a capitalist inevitability. But while its top-down approach was visionary, its legacy today is more cautionary than triumphant.
This is the story of how France tried to programme a better future — and what happened when that future changed.
Part 1: The Republic That Taught BASIC
In 1985, under President François Mitterrand, the French government launched the Plan Informatique pour Tous — an audacious initiative to equip 120,000 classrooms with domestically manufactured microcomputers.
The machines — Thomson TO7s, MO5s, and TO8s — weren’t chosen for market dominance or versatility. They were chosen for sovereignty. Each one came with a light pen instead of a mouse, and ran BASIC by default — not to dazzle, but to democratise. They carried the promise that every child in France, regardless of postcode, would gain access to the digital age.
For a brief period, classrooms across the country became miniature code academies. Children wrote animations. Teachers ran programming workshops. The French curriculum integrated logic and computation years before Silicon Valley learned to sell it.
“We didn’t see it as tech education,” remembers Sandrine Perrot, now a UX designer. “We thought we were painting with electrons.”
But outside the classroom, another machine was claiming France’s imagination.
Part 2: Amstrad in the Bedroom
While Thomson ruled the schools, the Amstrad CPC dominated the bedrooms.
Sleek, colourful, and endlessly moddable, the CPC 464 and its successors offered everything Thomson couldn’t: games, sound, accessibility. With distribution through chains like FNAC and a robust second-hand market, Amstrads infiltrated French homes — not because of policy, but because of desire.
Here was computing for pleasure. You could play Barbarian, copy cassette tapes, write music, and join underground tape-swapping rings. While the Thomson represented duty, the Amstrad was joy.
“My friends and I had CPCs. We played, but we also coded,” recalls Jean-Luc Gautier, a former demoscener. “It felt like discovery — not instruction.”
This divide — civic order versus chaotic play — defined France’s dual-track tech culture. If Plan Informatique shaped the nation’s digital curriculum, the Amstrad CPC wrote its digital folklore.
Part 3: Minitel’s Private Revolution
Meanwhile, in the living room, France was already online.
Launched in 1982, Minitel predated the web by a decade. It was a state-sponsored videotex service with millions of free terminals distributed to households. You could book train tickets, chat, check stock prices, or visit message boards — all before Netscape Navigator existed.
It wasn’t just ahead of its time. It defined its time.
Minitel wasn’t slick. It wasn’t global. But it worked. By the early 1990s, over 25 million French people were connected. Services were decentralised. Content was user-driven. Adult chatrooms flourished. Activists launched underground boards. Even neighbourhood bakeries had listings.
“It felt like the town square,” says Claire Dubois, a former sysop. “And a carnival. And a confessional.” Minitel wasn’t just a technical feat. It was a statement — that digital life could be distributed, pluralistic, and powered not by ads but by access.
But like the Thomson systems, Minitel couldn’t scale beyond France. Its closed protocols and heavy state involvement made it incompatible with the open, messy internet that soon swept the world.
Part 4: What Didn’t Export
By the late ’80s, France’s digital ecosystem was already looking retro. Thomson’s machines — noble in intent — lagged behind in power and compatibility. Minitel, though widely adopted, was insular.
The Amstrad CPC, despite its popularity, never received the institutional backing it needed to become a national platform. And while French computing magazines like Tilt and Micro Hebdo kept users engaged, France never fostered the kind of global software culture that emerged from Britain or the US.
Yet innovation persisted. In Toulouse, a group called Les Gueux du Chipset modded MO5s to play chiptunes. High schoolers used BASIC to create interactive fiction. Minitel hackers reverse-engineered terminals to access hidden services.
Even in a top-down system, subversion found its syntax.
Part 5: Legacy in the Cloud
Today, the machines are obsolete. The policies long shelved. But the ideas — of public access, digital sovereignty, and ethical design — have returned.
The GDPR is rooted in French thinking. The rise of federated platforms like Mastodon echoes Minitel’s decentralisation. The “cloud de confiance” initiative directly channels France’s belief in national infrastructure.
And retro computing thrives. Communities like MO5.com archive TO7 software. Festivals in Lyon feature Minitel art installations. A new generation rediscovers the light pen.
“My daughter uses Scratch,” says Laurence, now a teacher. “But sometimes, I plug in my old TO7 just to show her what it felt like. It had presence. It asked for patience.”
Conclusion: A Public Dream, Rebooted
France’s 8-bit moment never went global — but maybe that was never the point. It asked a different question, one still worth asking: What if technology had belonged to the public, not just the platform?
In 2025, as we reckon with tech monopolies, algorithmic opacity, and data exploitation, it’s worth remembering that there was another path — and that France tried to walk it.
Before the internet was a marketplace, France imagined it as a commons. And in the glow of every Thomson screen, that idea still flickers.
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