[1/3] 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 small 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
[2/3] due to poor colour balance on my phone, the video above appears blue-ish (like many monochrome CRTs).. but in person it is a plain white-on-black.
i could not believe that it arrived in its original box, styrofoam and all, built in 1990 by northern telecom.
[3/3] to my knowledge, this "alex magazine" guide has never been digitized since it was released in the autumn of 1990. i will be scanning it in and uploading it to internet archive in the coming week
it is a treasure trove of hilariously canadian products & services of its time, many of which still exist today
@smallsco same here. i have redditor /u/HowardAnkan to thank for discovering it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/um6dxt/just_got_this_alextel_terminal/
looks like mine may be missing the glorious handset sidecradle though :D
@goto80 great question! I don't *think* it has a vector-based graphics chipset... given that it was based on the minitel standard, I suspect it has a bitmapped/rasterized character set, but that's just guessing for now! since there is almost zero information on the alextel service, we're kind of at a new frontier in figuring out canadian retrocomputing history :)
i just looked at the telidon vector screenshots - those are incredibly impressive.
@vga256 Sadly, I only saw one live in a computer expo in the early-mid 80's as a kid tagging along my coolest aunt. It was a demo of the Telidon system, before Brazilian state-owned telcos settled with Minitel.
Most displays back then were raster. NAPLPS encoded graphics as vectors, but, like the DEC VT-*30's, it rendered the vectors to a raster framebuffer.
@rbanffy ah yes, we got Telidon briefly in canada too.. unfortunately, another system I missed due to being far away from a major city in my childhood.
yes, this machine is clearly a raster display
@vga256 1200 was too slow for a bunch of the games Opticomm had.
The Alex had no niceties of any decent software, the ROM was tied to Bell(ludicrously prices per minute).
But you could type the AT commands manually, everybody memorized ATDT 921-6366 .
They were really popular at parities so everybody could dial in and talk to those who couldn’t make it.
Opticomm was a 15+ line board, not everybody was a geek but was friends with one. Weirdest mishmash of people ages 12-30
@Anrky interesting. i was cruising at 2400 baud in the same time frame, and had no issue with door games.. that being said, they were all turn-based ones at the time.
15+ lines is a huge board.. there were only a handful of anything that size in alberta in the 90s. (and most of them were Doom multiplayer boards by 93)
wonderful to hear that it supports the Hayes command set. do you know if the device supported any NAPLPS or vector based drawing of any kind? several folks have asked
@vga256 The Alex terminal was as cheap as you could get. It did nothing but be a terminal. The finest early 80’s technology.
https://wiki.mbbsemu.com/doku.php?id=modules:elwic
Infinity Complex was the big game on Major BBS, but you got clobbered by people on 9600/14.4 baud.
First game where I saw people wrote scripted bots for the game to play by itself. They became additional enemies cause they were killer if you didn’t know how to avoid them.
Le réseau Minitel étant maintenant hors service depuis plus d'un an, on voit apparaître de nombreux Minitels dans les vides-greniers. Devenus totalement inutiles pour le commun des mortels, certains Minitels possèdent cependant la capacité à être connecté à des périphériques, via une liaison série, permettant notamment d'imprimer les pages minitel affichées, mais également d'utiliser le ...
@vga256 @mmu_man @jelora @driscoll @museeminitel
Minitel-like, same speed (Bell standard ?) but with NAPLPS (geometric) instead of CEPT-2 (alpha-mosaic).
@vga256 Holy shit you found one!
Does it have documentation? That program is barely oral history. I'm pretty sure my thesis is the only academic reference to it in decades.
@opendna it sure does! :) https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/109536053063692189
(the user manual is the last third of the 'magazine').. I still have to scan the entire thing over the holidays
have a link to your thesis? would love to read anything on the project, hardware and it's social history
Attached: 4 images [3/3] to my knowledge, this "alex magazine" guide has never been digitized since it was released in the autumn of 1990. i will be scanning it in and uploading it to internet archive in the coming week it is a treasure trove of hilariously canadian products & services of its time, many of which still exist today
@vga256 Thesis is here: https://summit.sfu.ca/item/12185
I was writing a broad history so the discussion of TELIDON is only one paragraph p45-46. I estimated n~20 theses and n~950 articles about it between 1983 and 1987 (Chap 3 for methods and discussion).
Uni libraries should have the theses in hardcopy (none were near me).
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