Breathing life back into a Minitel 1B with the Minimit
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
First was, my version required a key combination to be input in sequence to trigger the video mode change from whatever the original was to roughly double the lines/chars, then turn off local echo, and up the baud rate from 1200 to 4800. And unfortunately I could not send these keystrokes over the serial port.
I had considered attempting some sort of ROM hack to enable these modes all the time but never went through with it (also my main ROM was soldered to the board, not removable like some later models)
Eventually what I did was use a Teensy uC and a system of optocouplers wired to the keyboard matrix that 'pressed keys' in the right order at the right time to enable the mode I needed automatically on powerup. Timing was difficult as if I attempted to 'press' the keys too quickly or exactly together it would misinterpret or drop the commands.
Now that the terminal would auto-configure itself upon power on, a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B running Raspbian in CLI-only mode with a wifi dongle was shoved inside it and hardwired to the serial port (with a TTL level shifter between it and the Pi's UART) and I had this setup running a few small programs I wrote to display weather, stocks quotes, 'screensavers' etc.
I had the unit on my kitchen countertop by my coffee machine and for a while would turn it on every morning to check news and whatnot. Something about it was just super satisfying; the limited information meant my morning coffee wasn't overwhelming- just the day's weather, a few stock quotes, and a few headlines pulled from the BBC. All with this super cozy glow on the white-on-gray CRT.
Unfortunately I eventually pulled it off my countertop and cannibalized the machine for other projects. The whine of the CRT wasn't something I wanted in my kitchen running all day. The little keyboard was cute but the keys made any lengthy input tortuous. And the power draw just for the nostalgia factor every morning didn't make a lot of sense when I have my laptop nearby anyway. I have no idea what the power consumption was but the little guy could put off some heat that is for sure.
Sadly practicalities won out over the aesthetic.
This being in 1995, I didn’t really have much by way of resources to figure out what the heck they actually were. I eventually surmised that they were part of some French telephone network, but these had US keyboard layouts and ran on 110, so to this day I have no clue what they were actually useful for, why they were designed to run in the US, or who threw them in the trash or why. It might have been in the vicinity of the local French consulate, but then again it might not have, as today the consulate is several miles away, and I have no idea if it was always there or if it has moved in the intervening period.
Wish I knew what happened to those weird terminals; sadly, chances are they were thrown out during a move or something.
Yup, sounds like what happens when you power on a minitel. They are essentially thin clients as far as I know. Most setups I've seen had these plugged into the same outlet as a nearby phone. You would power on the minitel, pick up the phone and dial the phone number of a remote server ("3615" was the common one). Text would start appearing on the minitel with a landing page that acted as a service index and where you would be able to type in the name of the service you wanted to access, for instance SNCF to book train tickets.
For instance this is a low quality video of someone using the 3611 phonebook in 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS3DazMR3QY
There seems to be a few other phone numbers that you can still dial, hosted by individuals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2mgDSBWOxI
Thin clients are just display devices, completely incapable of anything without a server.
They could definitely do some local computing. Most notably to me is that by the mid 90s you could stick your credit card in and it would negotiate with the chip in the card so you could buy something securely.
(Apologies to American readers who didn't get chips in their cards for another couple of decades)
This isn't necessarily evidence of local computation though – the EMV protocol is fairly lightweight (even for 90s standards), and I could imagine a remote EMV terminal implementation, with the handful of ISO 7816 APDU exchanges required for a minimal payment being sent over the network.
That's how e.g. the Nintendo 3DS can support Suica payments, which is another amazing (and to me unexpected) application of a normally merchant/terminal-side payments technology in consumer hardware.
> Apologies to American readers who didn't get chips in their cards for another couple of decades
I still use at least one non-chip/magstripe-only card regularly… Well, one day!
I’m 2018 I went to visit my family in Australia. Only one of my US cards had a chip but I called and got a different card to send me a chip version so I’d have two.
Got home, tried to buy a coffee and the bloke behind the counter called out to a colleague “hey, do we still have a way to pay with a chip?”
(Of course most places did, but it was on its way out)
I wonder how well (or if) that works with European-issued cards – some issuers require these to be inserted and a PIN be entered every few payments to reset the internal risk counters.
But sadly the source code, hardware instructions to make one oneself or tinker with it are missing.
The competition was so great that when the Brits rocked up at a French trade show in the early 80s, the French organisers pulled the power to their stand, or that's how the story goes..
In any case, sadly Prestel wasn't quite as successful as Minitel in the end. Perhaps the UK concentrated more on getting out Micros like the BBC and promoting computer literacy instead.