Minitel, as described in this project’s listing, is a French great-uncle of the Internet appearing frequently in retro-computing projects. While generally not used outside of France and a handful of other countries, the system did run on millions of dedicated terminals and wasn’t officially retired until 2012. So if you’re in the right place (i.e. France) you might get lucky and pick up one of these devices for a song.
As shown in the video below, these terminals can actually be quite retro-chic, and with a ‘secret’ peripheral port, it’s possible to get them to do your bidding without actually opening up the housing. That being said, Minitel projects generally require some combination of the appropriate connector, an Arduino/Raspberry Pi/etc, breadboard, connectors ,and other such electronic tidbits.
Such a setup can be difficult to work with and transport, and not nearly as fashionable as the Minitel box itself. To help with this challenge iodeo created the Minitel ESP32 dev board. The device includes everything you need to get your terminal working, and is powered from the Minitel device itself. The ESP32 module allows for wireless network interface and OTA programming. So you can change the terminal’s behavior without actually touching anything, or use it as a terminal to interface with other networked devices like a Raspberry Pi.
While such a setup would be difficult to obtain where I reside in the US, if you’re in more Minitel-abundant regions, you’ll know what to do if you come across one of these boxes!
