3615 Ulla was a Minitel microserver for dating and chatting, part of the so-called pink Minitel. It was one of the most popular Minitel services.
(post updated 2024)
Tag Archives: 1980s
Floridatex, a student work by Robertson Adams, 1980s. The first image was made with an AT&T Frame Creation Terminal 100. Unknown source. It is possible that this was never live, but part of the videotex experiments at the University of Florida. (see p.45)
Telidon/NAPLPS ads created for Bank of America (1982) by John Vaughan at The Communication Studio. More examples on his Youtube channel. In 2019 he posted more graphics and info on his blog.
Teletext graphics by Richard Gingras, 1980. This service was called Now and ran on KCET-TV. It was part of a collaboration between CBS, NBC and PBS to test the French Antiope standard for teletext. The project was supported by Télédiffusion de France.
Images from Gingras’ website, which is only partly archived on archive.org. There’s an interview with Gingras about his teletext work here.
Post updated 2024.
Toxic Wastes from A to Z (coming after you and me) by John Fekner is a parody of a children’s alphabet learning aid which runs alphabetically through a list of toxic pollutants. Martin Nisenholtz invites John Fekner, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and others to experiment with an early interactive computer graphics system (Telidon) at New York University’s Alternate Media Center (Interactive Telecommunications Program). Fekner received his first international award at Toronto’s Video Culture Festival in the Videotex category.
SCOOP was a teletext magazine for teenagers, available at ten high schools in USA, 1985. It was broadcasted on WGBH-TV in Boston using the NABTS/NAPLPS standards, which included the alpha-mosaic features of the French Antiope standard (see page 12).
“The kind of information presented (topical subjects, sports scores, around town information, etc.), the way it was presented (short, tightly edited segments), and the format (contemporary, graphic-heavy, easy to access) were appropriate to a teenage audience.”
More info in Formative Evaluation for Educational Technologies. Post updated in 2024.
Reabracadabra by Eduardo Kac, 1985. Visual poem made for the Brazilian videotex service Videotexto, which was based on Minitel. I wrote about this work for Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology.
A mobile phone version was made in 2003. Post updated in 2024.
An introduction to ABC80, the Swedish answer to the TRS-80. It was built by the government-owned Luxor, and had a textmode that supported monochrome teletext, like you can see in the video. As a bonus, here is a video of a guy browsing the web with the ABC80.