French Minitel terminal turns into a peculiar AI workstation

Earlier than the remainder of the world started logging on to the World Huge Internet, the French had a really attention-grabbing on-line service referred to as Télétel. It was considerably much like early bulletin board techniques (BBS), however with far more performance than actually the rest from the period. By 1982, Télétel was out there in most of France and clients may use it to buy on-line, chat, and even discover love. They accessed Télétel by Minitel terminals and people don’t have a lot utility immediately, so Nino Ivanov used an Arduino to show his right into a peculiar sort of AI workstation.

Customers didn’t “go online” to the Télétel service with computer systems, however with terminals. These had been cheap, which helped to foster widespread adoption. The truth is, Télétel was so fashionable that it remained in use till 2012 — lengthy after the French came upon concerning the web. 

There have been many Minitel gadgets manufactured and offered through the years, with some fairly neat designs. Ivanov’s seems to be a mannequin made by Philips and it has a nifty slide-out keyboard that sleeps beneath the monitor when it isn’t in use. However all Minitel terminals labored in an identical method, as a result of they related to the identical service in the identical manner. That was by a 5V TTL serial connection.

Ivanov related an Arduino Mega 2560 board to the Minitel by the serial port so the 2 may speak to one another. He then set that up with uLisp, which is a spinoff of the Lisp programming language designed for microcontrollers. With uLisp, Ivanov was capable of run a symbolic synthetic intelligence on the Arduino {hardware}, speaking with it by the Minitel terminal.

That AI’s capabilities are, in fact, very restricted. However it’s nonetheless fascinating to look at in motion and it provides the previous Minitel terminal a enjoyable new goal.