Oh hey look what popped up on my feed:
https://mobile.twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/status/1012770446129926145
@enkiv2 Now a real challenge for retro-computing enthusiasts would be to find a working French Minitel and find a way to put it to work via telnet over the internet.
@enkiv2 I don't know. If I had to guess, I think French retro tech didn't get spread around the world as much. I think Aussies and other former colonies got access to BBC micro and Sinclair. It's not unthinkable that other devices from that era enjoyed a similar destiny.
I got lucky to use a Minitel when I was little, but that wasn't normal for most people.
AFAIK Minitel used a standard CEPT viewdata protocol but would have different characters for accents (probably where some brackets/arrows are on UK versions of viewdata character sets).
Over a telephone line Viewdata used 1200bps downstream and 75bps upstream (as analogue phone circuits were often very noisy until 1990s), I'm not sure if the serial port on the back of many units had to use the same or could use 1200bps for both RX and TX...
