Beginning in the early 1980s, France's Minitel service allowed users to go online for banking, chatting, and shopping. At its height in the mid-1990s, French citizens owned about 9 million Minitel devices -- the first widely available screen-keyboard combination in any country. Minitel allowed some 25 million users to regularly connect to more than 23,000 services, including being able to make train reservations, check stock prices, monitor bank balances, and chat with other users. In kenya the above is a new innovation and a bright idea.........37year later ! -- "I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”