Minitel

Minitel
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Minitel: "The new art of communicating worldwide". Before there was widespread use of the Internet, there was Minitel. Just ran across my old account handbook. Great services like: Eaasy Sabre (flight info, $.20/minute); Wall Street Quotes ($.20/minute); Send a Western Union Mailgram ($.10/minute).

17 years of ALA programs

Doing some office cleaning. Assuming ALA has copies.

Digital Library for Survivors: DIY Steampunk Internetz

2010-06-24-IMG_8543
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Many people have a fear that one day the tubes that connect the various Internetz will become damaged, or perhaps even clogged with a mis-guided top-shot attempting to stop spam originating with the Twitterz or PhaseBookz. If this were to happen, access to the contents of our carefully crafted digital libraries will fail, leaving us at the mercy of fax machines and even, perhaps, mimeographs.

To deal with these real and present danger, I've begun work on a back up option. Connecting a classic Royal manual typewriter to a Zoom 56 baud modem, I'll get connectivity. For storage, a cassette drive will provide massive storage (recycling all those old mix tapes)

Still to be worked on is an alternate display (to augment the direct to print provided by the Royal).