regarding ATM and DSL - A lot of setups in Europe apparently used PPPoA, not PPPoE, meaning your DSL line integrated easily with the ATM network on the backbone from my understanding.
Thanks,
In France it started with PPPoA, yet quickly it moved to PPPoE (~1999).
People indeed used PCs not minitels to connect to the new thing of the time (Internet). At the time there was a need to update PCs as most individual or family customers had Windows 98.
My experience is that it added instabilities to PC with Win98 where if I remember correctly PPPoE worked out of the box with Win2K and WinXP (it's was a long time ago).
Anyway most home PCs of the time where not to able to deal with the speed of ADSL. I remember that the owner of a restaurant in Rennes wanted us to pay them a new PC!
While PPPoE worked on WinXP, driver support when transitioning to XP was quite a big issue for some.
I still remember hacking the inf files to get my modem work on it as an early adopter.
