Registration now open for my talk “Hacking Telidon in the 21st Century” at InterAccess in Toronto, Sept 8, 6 to 7:30 pm

https://interaccess.org/event/2023/hacking-telidon-21st-century

#telidon #videotex #interaccess #netart

Not long now until the opening of "Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story" at InterAccess in Toronto! Featuring early Canadian videotex art shown on interactive Telidon displays created by yours truly.

... assuming I get them done in time ... 😬

https://interaccess.org/exhibition/remember-tomorrow-telidon-story

#telidon #videotex #interaccess

#Keyboards #Minitel2 #Alcatel #videotex

in the late #80s Bell canada created an interactive videotex service few have ever heard of called #AlexTel

like france's #minitel terminals, the alextel is similar in design and layout. it houses a surprisingly light mono CRT inside the plastic shell, and a fold-out keyboard that neatly folds up to hide the screen.

inside is a 1200 baud modem that you'd use to connect to bell's alextel dial-in service

can't wait to try this out on a dial-in #bbs

#obscure #retrocomputing #videotex #history

Since some time I have been drawn to research Minitel, a French Videotex-based system for accessing information that predates the Internet. It was a revolution in terms of digitalization which made activities such as buying train and plane tickets, signing up for classes and reading newspapers digitalized as early as the 80's. You can read more about it in the following Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
There were many devices invented to make Minitel accessible to the blind, although the system itself wasn't designed with this target group in mind. Mostly, they were external speech synthesizers like in the case of Lectel:
https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/12/10/les-ordinateurs-ont-la-parole_2931817_1819218.html
or the Valentine text-to-speech card for the Apple II:
https://blog.atalan.fr/valentine-carte-de-synthese-vocale-nee-en-1986/
The history of the Eurobraille company, the makers of the popular Esys, Esytime and B.Note Braille displays, starts also with a speech synthesizer for the Minitel terminals.
https://www.eurobraille.fr/notre-histoire/
As I found out, however, most of France's blind community at that time did not have access to this kind of technology and Minitel only became accessible on a global scale in the 90's when regular PC's did but then it was almost the time of the Internet so it never gained the same momentum as it did with the society at large. Pity as this could have been an opportunity to push the inclusion of blind and partially sighted people to whole new levels.
Always design with accessibility from the start!
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #France #Internet #Minitel #Videotex #RetroTech

There's some #videotex #viewdata on this week's #TheSecretGeniusOfModernLife
This quick photo I took is showing #Telstar

Never really did a proper #introduction before. Let's see ...

#retrocomputing
#videotex
#telidon
#ScienceFiction
#drawing
#ModernArt
#cycling
#CatPics
#libraries
#archives
#museums
#LibraryTech
#programming
#Web1
#gemini

... so, nothing too remarkable then ... 🙂

Hey @FunkyBob - Look what I found. Predates when you worked there though. Still seems to work too (tho it needs a little bit of TLC). #bbs #videotex #dialup

Le #Minitel est un type de terminal informatique destiné à la connexion au service #français de #Vidéotex baptisé #Télétel , commercialement exploité en France entre 1980 et 2012. Donnant accès à des services variés préfigurant ceux du futur #Internet , et utilisant pour cela le réseau français #Transpac qui lui-même préfigurait la future infrastructure de transmission d'Internet, il a hissé la #France au premier plan de la #télématique mondiale.

#Teletext Page Editor. #Videotex #Ceefax

https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/editor

Happy funtimes like it’s 1975.