Vintage Teletype Device Talks to Modern Robot with Baudot Code

Recently, Sam Battle of the YouTube channel LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER posted a series of videos toying with an Ultratec Minicom, a '90s-era teletype terminal developed before texting to allow the deaf and hard-of-hearing to send messages over handset phones. As it was originally intended to be used, you simply set your handset on the device and type in your message, where it would transmit to such setup and be read out, demonstrated here. Essentially, the system used Baudot code, an early character encoding method and the most common teleprinter code until ASCII. The code takes a keyboard input, and translate that into sound signals which run at a certain baud rate that would send through the phone network to another Minicom terminal and be translated back into language.

A new project spawned, inspired by the odd retro devices: a Raspberry Pi build that uses the Minicom and Baudot code to take user input and relay it to an original modern robot. The robot, an original Mac case-housed design made on the channel, responds, in turn, using a '90s AI software called MegaHAL, a computer conversion simulator or “chatterbot.” The video shows off the Raspberry Pi device — consisting of the Pi, an audio interface to receive code and return the robot’s reply, and a series of LEDs that send signals of different parts of the code—as well as the conversation partners in action. There is also a forum thread detailing the development, particularly the transfer of Baudot code to the MegaHal and back, and everything else that went into getting these two weird pieces of tech to converse.