[ih] Videotex

[Bill Ricker]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 1:54 PM markotime via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Canada had a fairly active program going, but not enough inertia around the
> world.  IIRC, minitel may have been a candidate here.
>

minitel -

When i was at MITRE - in the same department as the MILNET/DoDIIS project
(including MAP), mid 1980s, corporate IT acquired a few minitel terminals
as experiments for remote (=300bd? dialup) access. I signed one out for a
weekend.
Alas I must say I rather preferred the Tandy/RadioShack 100 portable, it
had a much better keyboard if one was a decent QWERTY typist; either was a
tradeoff on screen real-estate. TRS just didn't have the mass production of
France Telecom bringing Minitel unit-prices down.
(Either was an arguable improvement over the TI Silent 700 or the bigger
portable printing terminals that came before, despite those being full
width. )


-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux