Reviving Minitel with Arduino – Hackster.io
Before the internet, people were already trying to connect to share information and data with one another via technologies like bulletin board services. The idea was more or less the same, but the infrastructure for a global network had not been built yet. One of the more interesting pre-internet online services was Minitel, which thrived throughout France in the 1980s, and somehow managed to limp along all the way until 2012.
Not only was this interactive online service fairly large, with millions of monthly connections via telephone lines in its heyday, but it also had a unique dedicated terminal. As you might expect, these terminals are still a favorite of hardware hackers even though the Minitel service itself is now defunct. And to use the terminal, you do not even need to hook it up to a telephone line via a very odd French connector — it comes equipped with a serial port.
It is a non-standard, 5-pin serial connection, but that is more than made up for by the fact that it operates at 5 volts. That makes it directly compatible with a lot of Arduino boards — no level shifting required. YouTuber Nino Ivanov took advantage of that fact to hook his Minitel terminal up to an Arduino Mega 2560 development board.
Using the terminal is still a bit fiddly because rather than ASCII, the Minitel defaults to a Videotex encoding of the character set. It actually can operate in ASCII mode as well, but for some reason that forces it into an 80 column mode, instead of the default 40, and also reduces character brightness, both of which detract from the terminal’s retro aesthetics, which is what a project like this is really all about.
Minor issues aside, Ivanov wanted to use the terminal for AI, because what else are you going to do with retro hardware in 2025? I know what you are probably thinking, but no, Ivanov did not run outputs from the terminal through an API for ChatGPT or any other modern chatbot. Instead, he ran an implementation of the LISP programming language, called uLisp, that is designed for microcontrollers.
Back in the day, LISP was all the rage in the world of machine learning. So Ivanov whipped up a quick program to demonstrate its capabilities. In the demonstration, a topic sequencer was created, which essentially does some pattern matching to identify key “topics” and display all other known phrases containing the topic. You weren’t expecting a large language model, were you?
It may not exactly be cutting-edge tech, but the project is well worth checking out just to see the terminal in action. And if you have a terminal of your own, it might be fun to try out this project after you grow tired of accessing the private Minitel servers that are still online to this day.
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