When Countries Think They Can Go D.I.Y.

When Countries Think They Can Go D.I.Y.
The resulting drink was brown, bittersweet and uncaffeinated; one slogan was "You’ll Always Remember Your First." Today the Croatian firm Atlantic Grupa, which owns Cockta, considers its limited market to be driven by nostalgia and has put it in a portfolio
that includes four of what were once Yugoslavia’s most popular brands: Cedevita vitamin drinks, Argeta fish and meat spreads and the peanut-flavored corn snack Smoki.
Can the same be said of the baker in New York?" Users could search a national phone directory, buy clothing
and train tickets, make restaurant reservations, read newspapers, exchange messages and participate in online sex chats more than a decade before equivalent services were accessible through computers.
"I grew up in Brazil, and until the early 1990s we had the technology Americans had in the ’60s
and ’70s — like dial phones and TVs without remote controls, since our TVs and phones were all manufactured in Brazil," says Thomas Fujiwara, an economist at Princeton University.
They were intended, in the words of Mahathir Mohamad, the country’s prime minister at the time, to be a "symbol of Malaysians as a dignified
people." The company quickly captured 64 percent of the domestic automobile market — but the government was losing $15,000 on each car.
Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to the magazine
and author of the forthcoming book "Mental: Lithium, Love and Losing My Mind." Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.
At its peak, the Minitel had an estimated 25 million users —
but the internet rendered the boxy beige terminal obsolete, and the free service from France Télécom was turned off in 2012.