“Created in 1978 by France Telecom, Minitel was an information retrieval and texting service. Considered to be the most successful network prior to the world wide web. 30 years on in 2008 the network finally closed. (There is lots of info about this on Wiki.) overnight these terminals became obsolete.
Consisting of a CRT screen keyboard, modem and some shift registers, these “dumb” terminals are not capable of processing data. So what can you do with it ? Turn it into a clock !”