# Minitel (Télétel) Screen (ミニテル画面)

> 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.

- IndexStyle No.538 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/minitel-screen
- Kind: Style · Family: Digital Retro · Era: 1980–2012
- Mood: Nostalgia, Technology, Intimacy
- Color cues: #000000 / #00FFFF / #FFFF00 (cues taken from reference works, not a fixed palette)

## Defining characteristics

- 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

## 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

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: Everything sits on one fixed width cell. Since type size cannot change, emphasis has to come from reversed video and underlines alone.
- Layout & structure: 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.
- Material & texture: 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.

## What to avoid

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.

## Application checklist

Before calling a piece an application of this style, check it against the defining characteristics:

- [ ] 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
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Teletext Art (テレテキスト・アート)** — Screen art made inside broadcast text, a mosaic of 40 by 24 characters in eight fixed colors. The extreme abstraction of Ceefax weather maps and news pages is being revived now as a classic of constraint. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/teletext-art
- **Terminal UI (ターミナル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. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/terminal-ui

## Further study

- Minitel 1B の技術仕様書にある擬似図形（モザイク形態）の定義
- 8色が単色の端末で8段階の灰に置き換わる仕組み
- サービスが 3615 のような短い符丁で呼ばれ、その符丁が街に貼り出されていたこと

## Reference works

- Bernard Marti《ヴェリジーの Télétel 実験で使われた Thomson 製ビデオテックス端末》1980 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TerminalT%C3%A9l%C3%A9telV%C3%A9lizy1980.jpg
- Bernard Marti《写真ビデオテックスのページを映す Minitel》1984 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 FR — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ClownVTXPhoto.jpg
- Bernard Marti《日本語を表示する Minitel 端末》1986 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 FR — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zhonghuavtx.jpg

## Source of record

- IEEE Spectrum — Julien Mailland, "Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web"（著者はMIT Press『Minitel: Welcome to the Internet』の共著者） — https://spectrum.ieee.org/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/minitel-screen
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/minitel-screen/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compose_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)