This Old Minitel Terminal Has a New Trick Up Its Sleeve: A Direct Line to OpenAI's ChatGPT LLM
The finest interactive terminal the 1980s had to offer meets modern large language model systems in a collision of worlds.
Pseudonymous developer "goguelnikov" has brought a vintage communications system crashing into the 21st century — by connecting a Minitel terminal to OpenAI's ChatGPT large language model (LLM.)
"For those who don’t know about Minitel, it’s like the Nokia 3210 of [the] internet… it's a terminal used to access remote services like telephone directory, subscription, chats, 'Pink' services," goguelnikov explains. "At the time, you paid connections fees by the minute, and they were very expensive… In fact, only the French know about this stuff, because many houses had a Minitel terminal in the '80s-'90s. Today, all services have been shut down and people trash these useless terminals. Useless, until NOW!"
Launched in 1982, the Minitel system used keyboard-based terminals with cathode-ray displays to dial up to remote databases for a range of queries, including interactive services. What it never had was an artificial intelligence offering conversational responses to text-based queries, which is where goguelnikov's project — an amalgamation of two existing projects into one — comes in.
"Using an [Espressif] ESP32 dev board connected to the Minitel [with] two existing and well written libraries, here is the result: a simple ChatGPT terminal on the Minitel," goguelnikov writes. "I really like this anachronism: the state of the art AI [Artificial Intelligence] algorithm been accessed through the old fashion obsolete piece of tech! More than 40 years separate them."
A full write-up of the project is available on goguelnikov's Hackaday.io page; it uses the Minitel1B_Hard and ChatGPT Client for Arduino libraries.