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The electronic phone book project began two years ago with 55 volunteers in the north coast town of St.-Malo. Last year it expanded to include 1,500 families in and around the city of Rennes. This year the phone company has been giving systematic demonstrations to local groups all through the region. The service seems to be catching on. "People come expecting something much more complicated than the simple machine we actually show them," says Jean-Claude Lanoe, a technician involved in the promotional campaign. "By the time the demonstration is over, everyone asks, 'So when are you going to bring us these machines?' "
The idea of giving every Frenchman who wants one his own terminal is part of the Paris government's aggressive push into computers. Convinced that the technology is a key to industrial development in the 1980s and 1990s, the French are investing heavily in the field, building their own Silicon Valleys in Brittany and Lorraine. The Ministry of Industry even had the Académie Française, which is the mighty guardian of the French language, approve a shiny new word to go along with the new hardware: informatique. Some French officials are already worried about new examples of dreaded Franglais like le hardware and le software.
Once the computer has gone in the front door as an electronic phone book, the French have all sorts of other plans for it. The same video console can be used for many services, from remote-control banking to electronic mail to fingertip shopping. The French are experimenting with just about every conceivable application. In a test program in three suburbs of Paris, 2,500 terminals have been installed that permit people to check airline schedules or place orders with mail-order catalogues using the computer.
Thirty farming villages between Bordeaux and Toulouse have terminals that dispense data about social security rights, building permit procedures and agricultural laws. Bank managers at Crédit Agricole, a financial institution specializing in agricultural loans, can use 24 terminals in Brittany to look at the names, addresses and accounts of all their clients. In Grenoble and Nantes, users can tap two municipal terminals to summon information about military service, student fellowships and job openings. In Paris, 120 hotels offer their guests 4,500 pages of electronic information, ranging from gastronomic advice to the latest stock market quotes. Next year major informatique programs are scheduled to begin in Amiens, Lille and Nancy.
French ambitions go beyond national borders. In an effort to make Paris a world headquarters of the computer revolution, the government has established the grandly named Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressources Humaines (World Center for Personal Computation and Human Development). Headed by Author-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the organization recently lured to Paris four of America's foremost computer scientists. With that kind of expertise and top government support, computers of the future are likely to have at least a slight French accent.
—By Philip Faflick. Reported by Pam Schirmeister/Paris