Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by moviuro on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @04:31AM (#16264008)

FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our AZERTY keyboard.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by amiga-workbench on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:10AM (#16264164)

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.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by andrelaszlo on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @06:48AM (#16264535)

That's awesome! Do you have more information/documentation?

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by amiga-workbench on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @08:39AM (#16265135)

http://pila.fr/wordpress/?p=361 Sure, I used this guide.

http://millevaches.hydraule.org/info/minitel/specs/ Here is some information on the character codes too.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by hazeii on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @02:45PM (#16268327)

Just had a look in the library; I seem to have about half a dozen minitel manuals in there. Minitel terminal specs, "Specifications de la fonction decodage Videotex des Minitels" plus X25 stuff like "Specifications Techniques d'Utilisation du Reroutage TELETEL" and "Specifications Techniques d'Utilisation du Point d'Acess Videotex". Any use?

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by amiga-workbench on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @06:08PM (#16278401)

Those sound quite helpful. I'd love get a setup where I could talk to my minitel directly over its POTS line rather than having to enter the hotkey for serial terminal every time I power it on.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by chapelierfou on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @09:01AM (#16265307)

I built one of these adapters some time ago, you can find some information and useful resources here: https://chapelierfou.org/2016/06/a-minitel-as-a-linux-termin...

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by simias on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:36AM (#16264243)

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!

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by maeln on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:45AM (#16264274)

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.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by lloeki on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @08:41AM (#16265156)

> I think it works on Mac OS too

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):
        < > ≤ ≥
        = + ≠ ±
        : / ÷ \

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by louhike on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @06:34AM (#16264469)

You can use the following link (in french) to be able to do it on Windows:

http://chrisbertrand.net/fr/articles/clavier_fr_esp_maj.html

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by simias on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @07:42AM (#16264768)

I didn't know about the caps lock method (I always have it remapped to ctrl) but still, it's more like a workaround than a true solution IMO. Using caps lock to capitalize a word doesn't seem very pleasant: "Étant donné..."

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by plopilop on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @06:20AM (#16264400)

È and À are actually easy to write: the grave accent ` is ALT GR + è, then type your letter.

Special thought for the ù letter, which has its own key even though it's only used in one French word 'où' (ok, we use this word fairly often, but still).

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by baud147258 on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @07:38AM (#16264754)

I learned something today. Thank you.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by moviuro on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:44AM (#16264270)

> You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance

That's a limitation on Windows (and macOS?). On Linux, CAPS LOCK + é = É ; etc.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by digi_owl on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @01:23PM (#16267575)

> admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric.

More like US layout centric.

EVen the humble unix CLI is a straight pain on anything but a US keyboard, as things like / now require a modifier key.

Funny thing is that There is a variant of the US layout with the right alt being alt-gr, allowing most languages that use latin script to be typed.

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