41–50 of 68 posts
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https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi Yep, the adapter is easy to build. The minitel character set also has some handy glyphs in it for graphics.
That's awesome! Do you have more information/documentation?
http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ Here is some information on the character codes too.
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AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric. But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!
On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows doesn't handle it. But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it comes to programming.
Indeed, same on Apple's "French" keyboard layout, unless you select the "French (numeric)" one, in which case caps lock produces numbers. Also, ` is a dead key, as is ^ and ¨, which works with caps too, but there's no dead key for acute accent (é).
Other bits of trivia:
On macOS, the numeric keypad (if any) is always num-lock'd.
The Apple "French" layouts are vastly different from the PC ones (also available as "French - PC"), relying on visual symbolism for extra glyphs which makes them (sort of) easier to remember:
option-n is ~ (which turns out to be a dead key)
option-l is ¬, option-t is †
option-shift-l is |
option-( is { and option-shift-( is [
“smart” ‘quotes’ are on " and ' with option and option-shift
there are ligatures too: shiftable æ œ fi on option-a o and g
question and exclamation marks are reversed with option too: ! -> ¡ and ? -> ¿
option-d is ∂ PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL, option-shift-s is ∑, option-m is µ, option-f is ƒ
now guess how you do: © ™ ®
£ gives # when option'd (even though there's a dedicated @+# key)
shift-- is underscore, option-- is en-dash, option-shift-- is em-dash
similarly, there's also (grouped per physical key: no mod, shift, option, shift+option):
≤ ≥
= + ≠ ±
: / ÷ \Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, so…
I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries... There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The…
Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, so…
>Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service Which reminds me, that's also one of the rules of Project Xanadu: http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html#2 I wonder if that had turned out the same way had it ever been completed (or shall I say whether it will turn out the same way if it's ever completed?)
For those who are interesting in "Minitel revival", a guy did some great job recreating a Minitel server ! https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html
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https://imgur.com/a/R6pFi Yep, the adapter is easy to build. The minitel character set also has some handy glyphs in it for graphics.
That's awesome! Do you have more information/documentation?
One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats). It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries... There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The…
What happened to the thousands of miscellaneous services that were at one point provided ? What I mean to say is that minitel was in an incredible position to grow and be a massive platform, worth 3 digit billions of dollars, and instead traded this potential for charging for every second. This pushed all the random services (granted, mostly chat, and forum like things) that were cool at one point off off it, and fir…
In 1998, Minitel generated €832 million of revenue, of which €521 million was channelled by France Télécom to service providers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries... There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The…
Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.
And speaking of root -- on the Pr1me was also 'root' as a system engineer, and I remember fondly the day I messed up the parenthesis in a macro, and ran a tool that proceeded to memset() and erase the whole of the shared memory on the machine. That was about 30 people who all called.... the system's engineer (me!) to ask what was going on! Needless to say, it was blamed on a cosmic ray.
When we switched to HP it took quite a while to get the same level of performance with HP's own X25 hardware/software. It's also the one and only time I ever played with X25 socket() API.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries... There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The…
What happened to the thousands of miscellaneous services that were at one point provided ? What I mean to say is that minitel was in an incredible position to grow and be a massive platform, worth 3 digit billions of dollars, and instead traded this potential for charging for every second. This pushed all the random services (granted, mostly chat, and forum like things) that were cool at one point off off it, and fir…
They were bringing Ruinart champagne /by the pallet/ for employees to enjoy. Basically you could throw a party any day (for anything! like "I've just got new shoes", and you had unlimited champagne. Remember that was in 1989 -- a LONG time before dot.com era and even a long time before the excess of the 90's. Also a long time before it became socially inadequate to be rather drunk at work (on champagne only, mind you).
The employee benefits were also incredible, even by banking standard. I think we had 8 or 9 weeks paid holidays, and anything you didn't take was... paid to you at the end of the year, on top of the bonus (which was also generous).
In other words, not exactly a company that was skimping...