My Minitel Adventure
Poorly written by Billy on August 3, 2025After many years of wanting one and not buying one, I finally treated myself to a Minitel - specifically, a model 1, which is a glorious CRT + keyboard combination and an inbuilt modem (but not one that can dial, as I found out!).
-PICTURE HERE-
This terminal was provided to French citizens for free upon request, allowing anybody access to the Minitel network and services. However, my French is hilariously terrible and I don't have a lot of knowledge on the societal history - but what I do have is nerdy ideas and a way to connect it to the PSTN over VoIP, so that's what I did!
Connecting the Minitel to a phone line
The Minitel comes with two hardwired cables - one for 220V power, and one terminating in a French F-010 telephone plug, which has a passthrough for daisy-chaining another phone in-situ. As a Brit, I'm much more used to the British Telecom plug/socket which I have on many telephony devices. However, as both the ATA in my router and my ISDN PBX use RJ11, I will instead terminate the terminal with an RJ11 connector.
In the mean time, however, I was able to crudely strip the wires from a cheap BT-RJ11 cable and wire the one pair inside to the blue and white cables inside the Minitel adapter. This worked, somewhat, and I was able to successfully connect the terminal to MiniPavi, a French service for the Minitel. V.23 (the specification used by the modem for 1200 baud connectivity) is surprisingly resillient over VoIP, so once the connection was established I had no issue keeping the line up - other than the twisted cables being not great at staying twisted!
Actually using services
I dialled MiniPavi's number on my telephone (as this model cannot dial out itself), and pressed the Connexion/Fin button once prompted to do so, then immediately hung up the telephone - the Minitel will keep the line open and will start showing the MiniPavi home screen!
Here, various service options can be entered - I of course tried "TELSTAR" to access GlassTTY's Telstar service as it has the ability to translate frames into CEPT 2 for Minitel (whereas the UK used CEPT 3).