I took some time during the holiday to get the Minitel I inherited from the parents-in-law connected to my home server. As I already run Asterisk on the server and have analogue telephony hardware, I wanted to use the analogue dialup modem rather than opting for the serial port available on some Minitel terminals.

Overall the setup is:

Analogue Phone + Minitel Terminal => Grandstream ATA => Asterisk => SoftModem => Python Minitel Server

Here is a video showing initial connection and navigating to some adult content of the era:


hello.vectronic@gmail.com

I’ve held onto the hard copy of my Electrical Engineering Thesis for around 25 years. It recently suffered water damage so I decided it was time to immortalise it on the world wide web.

I say ‘world wide web’ in preference to modern terminology such as ’net’, ‘web’ etc. in homage to the title of the thesis:

A TOASTER WITH A WORLD WIDE WEB INTERFACE.

Here is a photo of the ‘completed’ project:


hello.vectronic@gmail.com

More than 20 years ago, in the ‘dotcom’ era, I worked for the web design agency Razorfish and managed to get involved in a more exciting gig working for a hardware spin-off developing the Pogo Mobile.

I was responsible for the development of the embedded web browser that acted as the sole UI for the device.

I came across this printout of a screenshot I took when the browser rendering started to take shape.