2004 would have talked of the century of communications history he had seen and would have regarded the end of Minitel as just a further step of progress. Born in 1899, Alan would tell stories from his childhood years at the cable station at Valentia Island, Co Kerry. “There were two brothers who worked for the cable company. One was on Valentia and the other was in Heart’s Content, Newfoundland; at night when things were quiet, they would send messages to each other.” It was a story that had a touch of the mythical, but the idea of a cable under the ocean must have seemed mythical in such times, as mythical as Minitel must have seemed in 1982. A system offering visual information to every household viawhen the call was answered.

It was 1995 before we took a mobile phone to France; the memory lingers of standing at a roadside outside of Le Havre on a fine August evening talking to someone in Northern Ireland. There was a sense of being at the cutting edge!

At the forefront of technology in 1982, Minitel was a disincentive to French take up of the Internet, but France has rapidly changed. Checking my phone for an SMS message at lunchtime, the man at the restaurant said, “Sir, we have free Wifi if you need to use it.” Clearly, he regarded SMS as now obsolete.

Perhaps in another thirty years, the car will contact the garage itself and carry out the necessary repairs.