Minitel Service Screen vs Terminal UI
ミニテルのサービス画面 / ターミナルUI
Minitel Service Screen comes from Digital Retro and Terminal UI from UI Expression. One is layout and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Minitel Service Screen
A service page built to finish inside one screen of a grid terminal. The name of the service sits along the top, the choices run down the screen as a numbered list, and headings and pictures are assembled from coarse blocks that divide the character cell.
Terminal UI
The terminal look: monospaced phosphor characters on black. The VT100's green afterglow became the primal image of the computer's face, repeated from hacker cinema to modern CLI tools.
| Minitel Service Screen | Terminal UI | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1980–2012 | 1970s– |
| Family | Digital Retro | UI Expression |
| Kind | Layout | Style |
| Cues | A band carrying the name of the service along the top, with numbered choices running down the screen in one column / Headings and pictures assembled from blocks that split a single character cell three down and two across / Only eight saturated colours in play, with no intermediate hues and no gradation / The place to type marked by a band of reversed video, with emphasis limited to reversal and an underline | Single phosphor color on black / The monospace grid / A blinking cursor / Scanlines and glow |
| Best used for | Fitting a picture and running text onto one screen where both must sit on the same character grid · Designing a screen limited to eight colours, where emphasis can only come from reversed video and underlines | Developer tools packing state and next steps into one monospaced screen · Staging technical hardness or secrecy as the look of an interface |
| Type | Everything sits on one fixed width cell. Since type size cannot change, emphasis has to come from reversed video and underlines alone. | One monospaced face where emphasis comes from weight and inversion alone |
| Composition | Rule the 40 by 24 grid first, then allocate heading, body and input field onto it. Never overflow the rows, because each screen has to be complete in itself. | Everything on the column and row grid, blocks separated by blank lines |
| Material | Build images from blocks that divide one cell into six, three down and two across. Hold to eight colours, and allow any single cell at most two of them, one for the character and one for its ground. | One phosphor hue on black with scanlines and bloom added sparingly |
| Caution | Smooth curves and midtones half erase the coarseness of the divided cell, and once that goes the grid holding the whole thing up stops being visible. | Heavy scanlines and flicker cost legibility and the atmosphere ends up beating the speed that made the tool worth using. |