It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off? There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can't find much information on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these networks?
I graduated from a Telecommunications technical school in Budapest in 1992. We took the exam from relay-based switching centres (also 7A2 and ARF102) and had to repair an old style rotary dial phone to pass and get a diploma. Our teacher told us about Minitel in France but emphasised that the real thing will be ISDN (64kbps). In a couple of years in college I had high speed Internet access, Silicon Graphics workstations with those beautiful, huge blue monitors. It is hard to imagine nowadays what a change that was, though switching from my Motorola flip phone to iPhone 4 was also quite something.
South Africa also had Beltel around that time, a very similar service I'm sure. I remember being wowed by the real-time cross-country chat and the better-than-ANSI block shapes for drawing :)
The article notes PRESTEL, and points out the key technical difference between the PRESTEL and Minitel architectures:
"Although [Minitel] wasn’t the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service providers to operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only the network, whereas in most other countries, a single organization had centralized control of both the network and servers for the videotex system.
In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the Prestel videotex system was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General Post Office."
