vga256Dec 18, 2022

[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

#obscure #retrocomputing #videotex #history

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@vga256 Super nice! Does it have vector graphics like Telidon? Or mainly text graphics? We've collected tons of Videotex graphics here if you're interested. :) https://text-mode.org/?tag=videotex
videotex | text-mode.org

Show threadvga256Dec 18, 2022

@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.

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@vga256 yeah, I think it's a good guess. The Antiope protocol used in Minitel could do custom charsets, changed on the fly. So you could do quite complex graphics, if you wanted to.
Dec 18, 2022 at 8:20pmWeb
Show threadvga256Dec 18, 2022
@goto80 extremely cool - I didn’t realize that the character set itself could be streamed with data! i assumed it was all hardcoded in rom