Getting a Vintage Teletype Device to Talk to a Modern Robot

On Look Mum No Computer, Sam has been messing around with a 90s-era Ultratec Minicom, a teletype terminal that was developed (before the era of text messaging) to allow deaf and the hard-of-hearing to send messages over a conventional handset phone.

The system used Baudot Code, an early character encoding method that allowed the Minicom to take keyboard input, translate it to Baudot Code sound signals, and send those through the phone network to another Minicom terminal on the other end.

In this video, Sam shows what happened when he got the Minicom to talk to one of his original Mac case-housed Kosmo robots. High weirdness and hilarity ensues.


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