Earlier than the web, individuals had been already making an attempt to hook up with share info and knowledge with each other by way of applied sciences like bulletin board providers. The concept was kind of the identical, however the infrastructure for a worldwide community had not been constructed but. One of many extra attention-grabbing pre-internet on-line providers was Minitel, which thrived all through France within the Nineteen Eighties, and one way or the other managed to limp alongside all the way in which till 2012.
Not solely was this interactive on-line service pretty massive, with thousands and thousands of month-to-month connections by way of phone strains in its heyday, but it surely additionally had a novel devoted terminal. As you would possibly count on, these terminals are nonetheless a favourite of {hardware} hackers regardless that the Minitel service itself is now defunct. And to make use of the terminal, you don’t even must hook it as much as a phone line by way of a really odd French connector — it comes outfitted with a serial port.
It’s a non-standard, 5-pin serial connection, however that’s greater than made up for by the truth that it operates at 5 volts. That makes it immediately appropriate with quite a lot of Arduino boards — no stage shifting required. YouTuber Nino Ivanov took benefit of that reality to hook his Minitel terminal as much as an Arduino Mega 2560 improvement board.
Utilizing the terminal remains to be a bit fiddly as a result of relatively than ASCII, the Minitel defaults to a Videotex encoding of the character set. It truly can function in ASCII mode as properly, however for some cause that forces it into an 80 column mode, as an alternative of the default 40, and likewise reduces character brightness, each of which detract from the terminal’s retro aesthetics, which is what a challenge like that is actually all about.
Minor points apart, Ivanov needed to make use of the terminal for AI, as a result of what else are you going to do with retro {hardware} in 2025? I do know what you’re most likely considering, however no, Ivanov didn’t run outputs from the terminal by means of an API for ChatGPT or another trendy chatbot. As a substitute, he ran an implementation of the LISP programming language, referred to as uLisp, that’s designed for microcontrollers.
Again within the day, LISP was all the fad on this planet of machine studying. So Ivanov whipped up a fast program to exhibit its capabilities. Within the demonstration, a subject sequencer was created, which primarily does some sample matching to establish key “matters” and show all different recognized phrases containing the subject. You weren’t anticipating a big language mannequin, had been you?
It could not precisely be cutting-edge tech, however the challenge is properly value trying out simply to see the terminal in motion. And in case you have a terminal of your individual, it is likely to be enjoyable to check out this challenge after you develop uninterested in accessing the non-public Minitel servers which are nonetheless on-line to today.
