Minitel (Télétel) Screen vs Terminal UI
ミニテル画面 / ターミナルUI
Minitel (Télétel) Screen comes from Digital Retro and Terminal UI from UI Expression. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Minitel (Télétel) Screen
The screen craft laid down by France's Télétel standard. Pictures are tiled out of mosaic characters on a grid of 40 columns by 24 rows, each cell divided three down and two across, and the whole palette runs to eight colours, which are black, white, blue, green, red, yellow, magenta and cyan. A service was known by the short code that followed 3615, and the terminals stayed in use until 2012.
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 (Télétel) Screen | Terminal UI | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1980–2012 | 1970s– |
| Family | Digital Retro | UI Expression |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | A grid of 40 columns by 24 rows where letters and pictures occupy cells of exactly the same size / Images assembled from blocks that split a single character cell three down and two across / Only eight saturated colours in play, which are black, white, blue, green, red, yellow, magenta and cyan / Emphasis available in two forms only, reversed video 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. |