Resident hypertext crank @enkiv2@eldritch.cafe

one company controls everything you remember from your childhood and has a vested interest in ensuring you never grow out of it

@h

to be fair it was in the era where such equipment was usually rented from the national telecom provider, and often carried its branding as well as (sometimes instead of) the OEM, and/or the contract did not specify a certain make (e.g in FR some terminals were made by Alcatel, I also remember seeing viewdata terminals in libraries (connected to a local network to search the book catalogue and sometimes community info) made by other European and Japanese OEMs..

@djsundog @enkiv2

@vfrmedia That's interesting. I didn't remember there were Philips Minitels. It makes sense that they would have deployed them in Belgium as well, without need of translation on the French side, and using the Dutch version on the Flemish side.

@enkiv2 @djsundog

@h @djsundog @enkiv2

TBH I think it was the Alice computer which didn't turn up much outside France, there was already the Tandy equivalent for USA and (briefly) the similar Dragon 32 in the UK.

Whereas some Minitel terminals were made by Philips and also used by PTT Netherlands for their domestic viewdata service, as well as for BT Prestel (especially with an interlinked experimental home banking system in the UK).

@h @djsundog @enkiv2

AFAIK Minitel used a standard CEPT viewdata protocol but would have different characters for accents (probably where some brackets/arrows are on UK versions of viewdata character sets).

Over a telephone line Viewdata used 1200bps downstream and 75bps upstream (as analogue phone circuits were often very noisy until 1990s), I'm not sure if the serial port on the back of many units had to use the same or could use 1200bps for both RX and TX...

@enkiv2 God Bless Moebius

@enkiv2 Now a real challenge for retro-computing enthusiasts would be to find a working French Minitel and find a way to put it to work via telnet over the internet.

@halcy send in a SCIgen paper (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/)

@enkiv2 I love this manual.

@enkiv2 I can almost hear my old French teacher reading that aloud:

Parlez le BAH-SEEK

A Variation Of The Buddhabrot That Produces Fractal Animations https://github.com/ecssiah/green-fractals

the weirdest thing about free energy is how solar panels are just too disappointing to be considered free energy by so many people

the mindblown emoji looks like a head with a mushroom growing out of it