Collaborate Disseminate
We’ve made no secret over the years here at Hackaday of our admiration for the Minitel. The ubiquitous CRT terminals which made 1980s France the most connected country in the …read more Continue reading Minitel, The 1980s Console Game Platform You Never Had
If you didn’t live in France in the 80s or 90s, it’s likely you missed out on one of the most successful computer networks in existence prior to the modern …read more Continue reading Bringing Back the Minitel
When it’s not just sticking fake gears on things and calling it a day, the Steampunk look is pretty cool. Imagining technology in a world stuck with Victorian aesthetics is …read more Continue reading YouTube Like It’s 1970s France with this Minitel-VCR Mashup
For British teenagers in the 1980s, the delights of 8-bit computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, or BBC Micro were firmly restricted to the offline arena. We would …read more Continue reading Teardown: Alcatel Telic 1 Minitel Terminal
Most of us who are old enough are likely to have had our first experience of an online service some time in the 1990s, either through the likes of Compuserve …read more Continue reading Bring A Minitel Terminal Back To Life WIth An ESP32
In 1980, France took a step into the future when the telecom companies introduced the Minitel system — a precursor to the Web where users could shop, buy train tickets, …read more Continue reading Minitel Terminal Becomes Mini Laptop
Before the World Wide Web became ubiquitous as the de facto way to access electronic information, there were many other ways of retrieving information online. One of the most successful …read more Continue reading Tiny Operating System For Tiny Computer
Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond our CRT monitors and 300 baud Hayes Supermodems.
Service providers varied by region, of course. The French …read more
Continue reading Arduino Revives A Classic 1980s Minitel Terminal
If you paid a visit to France in the 1980s the chances are you’d have been surprised to see a little brown screen and keyboard sitting next to the telephones wherever you went. At the time, it was another reason apart from the food, wine, and super-fast trains to envy our Gallic cousins. This was Minitel, their take on the cutting-edge of online data services of the day.
Minitel stood apart from similar services of the day in most other countries, because of its business model. Unlike the UK’s Prestel or West Germany’s BTX for which you had to spend …read more
