My Twitter timeline on a Minitel

Written on July 5, 2012

A few months ago, I hacked a Twitter client to read my timeline on a vintage Minitel.

It was fairly easy to do. The Minitel modem is bypassed by an Arduino that connect, via ethernet, to a Java based proxy running on the network. This proxy does all the heavy-lifting, i.e. it connects to Twitter using Twitter4J, it gets the timeline, it filters out a lot of stuff (eg. don’t try to use unicode on a Minitel!).

And here’s the result…

My Twitter Timeline on a 1980 Minitel from David Delabassee on Vimeo.