 With the French Minitel system, unlike any other service, the users were given an entire custom designed terminal for free.This was a deliberate move on the part of France Telecom, which reasoned that it would be cheaper in the long run to give away free terminals and teach its customers how to look up telephone listings on the terminal, instead of continuing to print and ship millions of phone books each year.Once the network was in place, commercial services started to sprout up, becoming very popular in the mid-1980s.