We’ve made no secret over the years here at Hackaday of our admiration for the Minitel. The ubiquitous CRT terminals which made 1980s France the most connected country in the world never made it to where we grew up, but OH! how we wanted them to! We’ve seen quite a few Minitels repurposed as serial terminals here, but for the time being we think [Louis H] has won the Minitel Internet with his plugin game console cartridges. These have a DIN plug to fit the Minitel serial port, and present themselves as a serial game.
The cartridge itself is an extremely simple affair, a tube which fits over the DIN plug body, containing a slim PCB with an ATmega328 and its supporting components. The games must be programmed such that their gameplay can work over a serial interface, so as an example the first game is a version of 2048.
We applaud both the simplicity and creativity of this project, and we love it that a new 1980s console we never knew we had has been unearthed, without the need for hardware modification. Meanwhile if you’d like to peer inside an Alcatel Telic 1, we can take you there.
Hi, over here in the German speaking countries we had Multitels for BTX service, too.
Tge latter wasn’t as popular among the citizens, but it was part of the Videotex family.
Prestel from the UK deserves to be remembered, too.
I seem remember it was silly expensive, both with a monthly rent for the device and the service, and high costs for data. Also not much advertising to the general public. Almost as if they wanted it to fail.
I had a look for some minitel or btx terminals recently, but they were much more expensive than expected, considering a lot of them were just scrapped. Looks like some collectors are bringing up prices.
Hi! Yes and no. It was costly at one point and not so much at another. It depends. I’ll try to remember and to give s short summary.
Browsing BTX pages could be costly, depending on how much the provider of a certain BTX page wanted to charge the user.
But it could also be free of charge, if the provider of a page was paying the fees for the user. For example, if someone was a customer of the page provider (say, the provider was a bank, a mail order shop, etc).
Then there also was so-called “Gastzugang” (guest access or guest login) for people without any BTX subscription.
They could retrieve all the free-of-charge pages, so to say.
Minus the telephone fees, I think.
But as time went on, more and more local BTX login numbers were available.
There also were public BTX phone boots for a while.
Here in former West-Germany, at least.
They were available in public places like train stations, airports, postal offices, the city hall etc.
They accepted guest login, as well as a valid BTX user ID (“Teilnehmerkennung”).
My father had often used this to send a messageb ack home to my mom, when he was in the inner city.
BTX had a message service, a bit like SMS or E-Mail.
On PC, Amaris BTX was a popular decoder software at the time.
Anyway, you’re not wrong saying that BTX wasn’t so popular.
In the grand picture, it was a niche.
France had embraced Minitel, whereas we merely used it. The business users, mainly. And computer fans, artists etc.
They loved to use BTX, sort of. For booking a travel, doing home banking, ordering things online (*Quelle# was popular for a while), check the national telephone book. Travel agencies also had used BTX a lot, I think.
Another service was the text-based Datex-P service, by the way. P for Packet.
It was the product name for the country’s X.25 access. X.25 was being used worldwide by databases. It’s related to AX.25 used in ham radio, too.. News agencies, governments, banks etc had worked with it. Each country had its own X.25 access.
That’s why BTX also was known as Datex-J later on (J for “Jedermann”, everyone).
Anyhow, that’s all that comes to mind right now.
Our Austrian friends had a better relationship to BTX, I believe.
Their citizens did better than us and accepted BTX.
Their postal agency also was providing BTX to fairer price model.
Austria had that little MUPID computer for BTX, too.
About the rent.. Yes, that was a thing.
There was an official modem, the DBT-03..
At the heart it was an 1200/75 Baud modem with an ancient microcontroller.
We’re talking about ~1980 computer technology.
By toggling a pin on the computer side (serial port), the DBT-03 would auto-dial the BTX node and transmit the user ID.
After that, the BTX software would take over.
But there was an alternative to the rent.
Users could also use an acoustic coupler that wasn’t directly wired to the landline.
Initially, that acoustic coupler had to be certified, too.
But that requirement was later dropped or nolonger being enforced, I think.
After all, there was no physical connection between acoustic coupler and landline. The official handset wasn’t being altered.
But yeah.. Typical mid-late 20th century era bureaucracy.
C64 users used things like that Dataphon model, I think.
To them that was more popular than using DBT-03.
They also were the ones to use pure software decoders,
which often didn’t meet the requirements for participating BTX service (too low-tech).
Anyway, they had been tolerated silently.
BTX software decoders also existed for Amiga/Atari ST. And Mac, I think.
These 16-Bit computers were much more suited for BTX..
By the late 80s, BTX compatible Hayes modems saw increasing use, too.
That’s when the change to more freedom for the user happened.
Things got more an more relaxed, so to say.
In the early 90s, the TAE wall plugs became the norm and users had their own modems.
The ancient DBT-03 box was still being supported by all decoder software, though. Up until BTX service was being ended.
I think the last tenants of BTX where the Sparkassen, and that was the only thing i ever regularly used in there for online banking. With paper TAN lists. ^^’
Otherwise, the 01300190 was my first gate into The Internet back in 1995, woho! Windows 3.11 and good old Netscape with a 28.8 modem which i also used for the last days of FIDO, i think i was the youngest point ever back then.
Most of this stuff was completely inaccessible for me at the time, both from the cost and availability standpoint…
I just had a look on French eBay, and Minitel seem to be easily available and affordable – though I have too many projects already, so I’ll just enjoy if someone else does something cool with them.
Brought me back. When I was in school in the 90s and 00s, our French textbooks were all developed in the 80s with obvious french cultural hallmarks of the decade – zut alors!
I remember a having to read a huge section about these, in French of course, and thinking how cool they were.
The netherlands had both Videotex and Viditel in those days. I can still remember that, in the late 90’s, car companies used a terminal to register/deregister cars with the RDW (Dutch DMV)
Prestel for the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex
For Xmas, a V25 reversible 75/1200 baud card from Matra plugged into the PC 1512 Amstrad ISA slot to learn Mosaic directly on “friendly” servers. I left enormous phone bills to my lovely Parents.
“the first game is a version of 2048”
Famously, 2048 is a low-quality blatant ripoff of Threes by Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend. They spent a year making Threes, then people spent a couple of weeks making bad copies, and then /those/ people got all the credit for the original idea. It’s, liike, the poster child for indie game plagiarism.
There are numerous cases of someone creating a game, a song, etc. only to have it improve by someone else. There’s something sad about it, and in the meantime, if it’s better…
I had a Minitel at home once…
You have to be very masochistic to use the keyboard of a minitel.
Actually using a Minitel when other choices of terminal exist is weird.
This. The keyboard was pure horror. The right discipline one needed to surf 3615 ULLA and enjoy the ASCII pr0n anims.