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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

Sounds very interesting. I would love to read about how you did that.

I don't remember much but I see there are many articles from people who've hooked a Minitel up to a Raspberry Pi or similar in recent times. I think it had a non-standard DIN connector, and you could make up a special cable to get RS232, possibly with a voltage change, not sure about that, and then I think you just had to talk to it very slowly; maybe 1200/75 baud, something like that. There were terminfo definitions for minitel (various models) and I see they are still there in Debian, which means you can write programs using libcurses to do primitive, slow 80s style user interfaces!

> using libcurses to do primitive, slow 80s style user interfaces!

As for "primitive" it's only on version 13 that Unicode got the 2x3 ITU T.100 mosaics used in Minitel...

People are still using Braille to draw graphics that could be neatly done with those terminals.

I'd love to play Nethack or IF in that machine.

If I had space in my life for more retro-junk I'd definitely love to have a working DEC VT100 or Lear Siegler ADM-3A if I could find one with the tube in good sharp condition so you could actually really use it to hack code on... but they probably go for a fortune by now, and ... well I just don't have space. For a slightly less rare and valuable terminal, a Wyse 60 would also be a good option (unless I'm misremembering, the keyboards were very nice and you could absolutely work on one of those today). When I was a kid all the libraries had Wyse 60s as catalogue search terminals, and I also learned how to use Unix through one of those beautiful things.

I had a couple of Wyse 60s that looked basically new when I got them, and they both broke (refused to display anything) quickly. It is rare in general for computer equipment to break when in my possession.

Oops: it was Wyse 55s I had (but they look just like the pictures of Wyse 60s I found on the web).

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