In the early 80s, millions of terminals were handed out to French telephone subscribers. almost 9 million of these Minitel dumb terminals were in utilize at one time, as well as keeping that degree of ubiquity, we’re shocked we haven’t heard of them before. These boxes were normally linked to the outside world with their interior 1200bps modem, however [O. Blt] came up with this develop (Google equate link) so he might link to a regional maker with an RS-232 port.
After digging up the pinout for the Minitel’s DIN-8 port, [O. Blt] created a bit board around a MAX232 chip scavenged from an old motherboard. Of program there was a requirement to get the terminal to do something, so [O. Blt] utilized the Minitel as a screen as well as remote manage for Winamp. The job was successful, however not extremely beneficial – at 1200 bps, the freshen is very, extremely slow.
American visitors may keep in mind linking to the Minitel network with their Apple ][s as well as C64s with CommunityLink, however this service was driven out of the market by the giants of pre-web dial-up, Prodigy as well as Compuserve. In any type of case, after seeing the AZERTY as well as alphabetic keyboard designs of these old boxes provides us a feeling of nostalgia for a time before whatever taking care of computers was standardized.