Minimit
Cécile Adam & Pascale Moise
Remember Minitel? Well, it’s time to bring it back to life! It’s quite simple: just plug a specially-designed mini-Minitel into the real one (which you’ve kept or can buy on Boncoin) and switch it on. The MiniMit contains an electronic board that connects to a Wifi network on one side and to the Minitel DIN socket on the other, creating a bridge between old and new technologies.
The mini-Minitel contains a dozen or so old services, from the telephone directory to 3615 ULLA (in chatbot form, using the famous Eliza program developed in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum) to news from 20 years ago. It’s a real throwback to the ’80s.
Pascale Moise & Cécile Adam
As it turned out, the vast majority of Minitel archives had disappeared. No one seems to have bothered keeping track of all these services. Fortunately, Pascale Moise and Cécile Adam, two Minitel pioneers, have been able to redevelop some of the emblematic services by carrying out a digital archaeology.
