https://spectrum.ieee.org/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web [ ] IEEE.orgIEEE Xplore Digital LibraryIEEE StandardsMore Sites Sign InJoin IEEE Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web Share FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER [ ] Explore by topic AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceBiomedicalComputingConsumer ElectronicsEnergyHistory of TechnologyRoboticsSemiconductorsSensors TelecommunicationsTransportation FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER Topics AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceBiomedicalComputingConsumer ElectronicsEnergyHistory of TechnologyRoboticsSemiconductorsSensors TelecommunicationsTransportation Sections FeaturesNewsOpinionCareersDIYEngineering Resources More Special ReportsExplainersPodcastsVideosNewslettersTop Programming LanguagesRobots Guide For IEEE Members The MagazineThe Institute For IEEE Members The MagazineThe Institute IEEE Spectrum About UsContact UsReprints & PermissionsAdvertising Follow IEEE Spectrum Support IEEE Spectrum IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the IEEE -- the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences. Our articles, podcasts, and infographics inform our readers about developments in technology, engineering, and science. Join IEEE Subscribe About IEEEContact & SupportAccessibilityNondiscrimination PolicyTerms IEEE Privacy Policy (c) Copyright 2022 IEEE -- All rights reserved. A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE websites place cookies on your device to give you the best user experience. By using our websites, you agree to the placement of these cookies. To learn more, read our Privacy Policy. view privacy policy accept & close Stay ahead of the latest technology trends. Become an IEEE member. Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Saving articles to read later requires an IEEE Spectrum account The Institute content is only available for members Downloading full PDF issues is exclusive for IEEE Members Access to Spectrum's Digital Edition is exclusive for IEEE Members Following topics is a feature exclusive for IEEE Members Adding your response to an article requires an IEEE Spectrum account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Joining IEEE. This article is for IEEE members only. Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of Spectrum's articles, podcasts, and special reports. Learn more - Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of Spectrum's articles, archives, PDF downloads, and other benefits. Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Joining IEEE. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN History of Technology Topic Type Feature Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web A decade before the Internet went mainstream, French citizens were interacting via Minitel, a computer network open to anyone with a telephone Julien Mailland Kevin Driscoll 20 Jun 2017 11 min read Minitel terminal SSPL/Getty Images It was the late 1970s. Former French presidents Charles de Gaulle and George Pompidou had recently died. The Arab oil embargo caused energy prices to quadruple for a time. Marseille remained gripped by drug lords. And France had to face the fact that its telephone network was one of the worst in the industrialized world. Fewer than 7 million telephone lines served 47 million French citizens, and the country's elite felt that the domination of U.S. firms in telephone equipment, computers, databases, and information networks threatened their national sovereignty. Or at least it damaged their cultural pride. In an influential 1978 report to President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, titled The Computerization of Society, government researchers Simon Nora and Alain Minc argued that the solution to France's telecom woes lay in "telematics"--a combination of telecommunications and informatics. They outlined a plan for digitizing the telephone network, adding a layer of interactive teletext video technology, and providing entrepreneurs with an open platform for innovation. Taken with Nora and Minc's vision, the nation's leadership began to lay the groundwork for France's computerized future. In 1983, on orders from the president, computer engineers within the Post, Telegraph & Telephone (PTT) ministry began to roll out throughout France a telematics system that came to be known as Minitel. It allowed ordinary people to obtain and share information online, launching the country into the digital age and leapfrogging the United States by more than a decade. The story of how Minitel came to be is a fascinating but largely forgotten one. To the extent that it's remembered today, Minitel is portrayed as a closed, centralized system encumbered by government bureaucracy that failed to change with the times. But back in 1983 it was like nothing anyone had seen before, eventually growing to have more than 20,000 online services before the World Wide Web even got off the ground. In Silicon Valley today, those who lived through the Minitel era tend to view it as the epitome of how not to build and operate an online system: They believe that letting the government design and run it just invited disaster. In truth, Minitel was never fully controlled by the state. It was a hybrid system--a public platform for private innovation. And it worked pretty well. To initiate a connection, a user manually dialed a local gateway using a telephone handset. The call, carried over the public switched telephone network, was answered by software running on the switch--typically a CIT-Alcatel E-10--which played an audible carrier signal back over the line. Hearing this tone, the user would place the handset back on its cradle and begin using the Minitel terminal, which would be carrying out a special handshake protocol with the switch. Rail travelers bought tickets from 3615 SNCF, news junkies gathered at 3615 LEMONDE, and dudes ( The gateways, known as points d'acces videotex, or PAVIs, provided an interface to a directory of known Minitel services, identified by short mnemonic codes. For example, rail travelers bought tickets from 3615 SNCF (SNCF being an acronym for Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer, the French railroad), news junkies gathered at 3615 LEMONDE (Le Monde being a leading Parisian newspaper), and dudes (mecs in French) browsed the personal ads at 3615 MEC. Like URLs today, these codes were printed in magazines, shown in television commercials, and plastered on the sides of buses. Once the user typed in the desired destination, the switch created a virtual circuit over a public data network known as Transpac, and data could begin to flow from the client's terminal to the host server and back. These virtual circuits used the X.25 network protocol, the paradigmatic packet-switching technique developed largely by researchers at the French Centre Commun d'Etudes de Television et Telecommunications. At the start, though, Minitel advocates faced a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would anyone adopt the system unless there were interesting things to do with it? And yet how could they convince entrepreneurs to create services unless the platform already had users? Somehow, Minitel needed to attract both users and service providers at the same time. To kick-start the process, the PTT ordered millions of Minitel terminals (built by French manufacturers such as Telic-Alcatel and Matra) and made them available at no cost to everyone in the country who had a telephone line. Anyone curious about the new system being promoted on TV could simply go to the post office and return home with a shiny new Minitel box. Minitel designers made the system fully plug and play: All you had to do was plug the terminal into the wall, dial the local gateway, et voila, you were transported into cyberspace. Meanwhile, would-be cybernauts in the United States who wanted to get online had to buy expensive computer equipment, install confusing software, pay hefty long-distance phone bills, and prepay a separate subscription to each service provider they wanted to use. The first service available on Minitel was an electronic phone book, or annuaire electronique. Equipped with a natural-language interface for search, this oft-used resource was an easy way to explore Minitel for free. Later, the government began to require that people use Minitel for certain administrative tasks such as university registration. These modest public services stimulated adoption of Minitel on France's fast-expanding telephone network. Whether from home, work, or at a public terminal on the street, by the end of the 1980s, every adult living in France had access to the network. A black and white photo of a man holding a phone and looking at a small monitor on a shelf. Sans y Penser: During the 1980s, Minitel terminals proliferated throughout France, where they became just another part of ordinary life. People used them regularly without thinking much about it, in their homes, at work, or in various public places. Owen Franken/Corbis/Getty Images Prompted by the growth of Minitel's user population, entrepreneurs jumped at the opportunity to create new services. These startups benefited from a novel payment system built into the Minitel platform that lowered the barrier to entry. Named after the newsstands that line the boulevards of Paris, the PTT's Kiosk system handled the accounting, collecting money from users at one end, cutting checks for service providers at the other, and keeping a tidy slice for itself. Small service providers could thus design lean information systems that generated profit without having also to manage customer relationships, take credit cards, or chase down past-due bills. Indeed, the app-store model employed by Apple, Steam, and others now is little more than a privatized version of the Minitel Kiosk. Providers were allowed to use any hardware or software they liked so long as its output conformed to guidelines published by the phone company. As demand for Minitel grew, the market for server hardware became fiercely competitive. Providers built their systems on any machine capable of running a multiuser operating system, from proprietary mainframes and Unix-friendly minicomputers to Commodore Amigas and IBM PCs. Beyond the iconic terminal equipment, France hoped to jump-start domestic production of server hardware as well. This part of the telematics project did not go as planned: Hacker-entrepreneurs demanded more Unix support, but French manufacturers such as Groupe Bull failed to provide it. As a result, Minitel services were often hosted on machines built by U.S. corporations such as AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, and Texas Instruments, and so, ironically, Minitel broadened rather than curtailed the U.S. presence in French telecom. Those administering the system encouraged service providers by offering high-quality documentation for free. Over the course of two decades, France Telecom published dozens of brochures on user-interface standards, terminals, PAVIs, protocols, and so on. A quarterly newsletter, La Lettre de Teletel, informed industry participants of the latest technical improvements and business experiments. f3 Elle Avait Son Sourire: Eventually some Minitel terminals were outfitted with credit card readers, making it possible for people to pay bills electronically and providing a great convenience. Photo: Michel Gaillard/REA/Redux French companies extended the Minitel platform with new kinds of terminals and peripherals. Terminals with built-in memory functions, chip-card readers, and high-resolution color displays began appearing on the market. Most Minitel terminals featured a serial port and multiple display modes, enabling users to connect the terminal to a printer, credit card reader, or PC. For small business owners, this flexibility transformed the Minitel terminal into a low-cost point-of-sale system. And long before the Internet of Things, Minitel was incorporated into a variety of home-automation schemes, allowing remote control of heaters, VHS recorders, security alarms, and sprinklers. With this open platform for innovation, telematics electrified the country, making France of the 1980s a place of tremendous digital experimentation and excitement. And, unlike ventures during the speculative boom and bust of the dot-com years in Silicon Valley, the Kiosk system provided a reliable business model for Minitel entrepreneurs, enriching a relatively large number of service providers in the process. The technical infrastructure of the Minitel ecosystem enabled the French to benefit from a wealth of online services at a time when the online landscape in the United States was limited to local BBSs and fledging walled gardens like CompuServe. Although it wasn't the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service providers to operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only the network, whereas in most other countries, a single organization had centralized control of both the network and servers for the videotex system. In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the Prestel videotex system was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General Post Office. Germany's BTX system was similarly arranged. In the United States, all of the content from The Source, an early private provider of online information, was served up from a single computer center in McLean, Va. Even 101 Online, a Minitel spin-off that operated briefly in the San Francisco Bay Area, stored its data in an office on California Street. That degree of centralization ultimately hindered innovation by excluding the kinds of garage and college-dorm startups that made the Internet what it is today. Minitel gave service providers considerable freedom over their systems, a feature that would become a staple of the Internet. Minitel's administrators also abided by an early form of net neutrality. The network did not favor one service over any other or otherwise discriminate. Occasionally, a service would be barred for breaking the law (by serving as a marketplace for prostitution, for example), but any such exclusion was subject to due process, and the system's administration could be sued if it acted arbitrarily. These guarantees of fairness stood in stark contrast to the situation in the United States, where private network operators could exclude content on a whim to serve their business interests. Of course, the advantages of the Minitel design came at a cost. The network used a nonstandard implementation of the X.25 protocol that prevented privately run servers from connecting directly to one another. Instead, all connections were routed through the public data network, effectively centralizing communications between hosts. This constraint was necessary for implementing the Kiosk system, but it also required each host to be individually approved by the state. Routing all traffic through the central network also enabled the state to attempt to implement a censorship policy on Minitel. Because of intense lobbying by existing print industries, only incumbent publishers got access to the Kiosk. In short order, however, would-be service providers began to route around this bureaucratic obstacle by printing fake newspapers, known collectively as the "ghost press," which qualified them for recognition by the state. Others bought and sold their access on a secondary market. In most cases, the Minitel administration was happy to connect these entrepreneurial mavericks, capturing one-third of their revenue in the process. Minitel was thus hardly the rigid, static system imagined by many Internet advocates of the 1990s. The hybrid architecture--bridging public and private, open and closed--provided a rich platform for innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when online services elsewhere in the world were floundering. For a generation of French citizens, Minitel wasn't about hardware, switches, or software. It was about the people they chatted with, the services they used, the games they played, and the advertisements for these services they saw in newspapers and on billboards. Many of the services that we associate with the Web had predecessors in Minitel. Before there was Peapod, there was 3615 TMK (Tele-Market), a service that enabled Parisians to order groceries for same-day delivery. Before there was Cortana or Siri, there were Claire and Sophie, services that provided personalized information using natural-language interfaces. Before there was Ticketmaster, there was Billetel. And before there was telebanking, there was Minitel banking. The services that most stand out in the popular memory of Minitel, though, were undoubtedly the messageries roses. These "pink chat rooms" were sites of flirtatious exploration that ranged from rather conventional online dating to discussions that were downright lascivious and crude. Pink Minitel services were not only popular, they were also most lucrative. The profitability of these adult-oriented services led to an advertising war among pink providers in print media, on television, and over billboards, so the phenomenon was hard to escape, even if you never used Minitel. Telematics advocates were by turns thrilled by this enthusiastic embrace of the new technology and concerned by its rosy hue. One PTT minister lamented, "[I do] not want telematics to have its image tarnished by the exclusive use of fornicatory fellowship!" photo of sign board for 3615 ULLA La Vie en Rose: 3615 ULLA was one of Minitel's many sex chat rooms--"messageries roses." Sagaphoto/Alamy The emergence of pink Minitel was the result of both low- and high-tech innovation. On the low end were the animatrices, a new type of information worker whose job was, in the words of one popular song of the period, to "digitally undress" users. Animatrices were often young men posing as women. Their task was to keep unsuspecting customers online for as long as possible. While many animatrices were paid, others were self-described Minitel addicts who bartered their services for free connection time. The entrepreneurs behind these pink chat rooms, some of whom would later dominate France's telematics industry, also developed more sophisticated tools to maximize their revenue. PCs rigged up with software allowed animatrices to handle multiple conversations at once. Another practice--frowned on by many in the community but nonetheless widespread--was to use bots to engage in online solicitation. Minitel tycoon Xavier Niel deployed such automated animatrices, inviting users to "come hang out with me in another chat room." The runaway popularity of adult-oriented services depended on certain privacy protections built into the network itself. Starting at the local gateway, all Minitel connections were anonymized. No usernames or credit card numbers were required, so the chat-room providers never knew the real identities of their customers, nor did they need that information to make money. Because billing was handled by the PTT, service providers received one lump sum per billing cycle, rather than dealing with thousands of individual accounts. This payment system, which effortlessly charged the user, is also the reason why Minitel was relatively free of advertising. Privacy and anonymity extended to the user side as well. Consumers' telephone bills did not reveal which sites they had visited. Instead, the telephone company aggregated all activity for the billing period into a single charge. So it was easy for an employee assigned work-related Minitel tasks to sneak into a chat room, pink or otherwise. To some, the messagerie became the new water cooler (to the dismay of many business owners). Minitel enthusiasts cherished the network's privacy and anonymity. In late 1984, Minitel engineers added a feature to the terminal that saved the last page visited and made it easier for the user to pick up an interrupted session--as a browser cookie does today. The public outcry was swift and brutal. Editorials in newspapers, which (rightly) saw Minitel as a competitor, warned that Big Brother had arrived. Some 3,000 terminals were returned in protest. The PTT soon dropped this feature. Minitel use peaked in 1993, when users logged more than 90 million hours at their terminals enjoying various Kiosk services. In the years to follow, usage declined as home computing and dial-up Internet access spread. Dedicated users could continue to access Minitel using terminal-emulation software, but many others simply moved on. The easy-to-use Minitel terminal and its straightforward videotex interface, once so groundbreaking but now proving inflexible, stymied further development. photo of junked terminals Salle d'attente: Junked terminals await disassembly for recycling. Bruno Martin/Reuters/Alamy Although hundreds of thousands of users continued to access the system each month through the 1990s and beyond, Minitel no longer seemed a shining symbol of France's telematics future. Rather, it was an unremarkable part of everyday life, no more dazzling than the radio or telephone. In 2012, after nearly 30 years of continuous operation, the PAVIs were shut down, and the Minitel era came to a close. But it would be wrong to view Minitel as a failure. Indeed, it offers an intriguing model for fostering innovation without sacrificing the public's interests in fairness and privacy. The millions of curious minitelistes and risk-taking entrepreneurs who flocked to the platform during the 1980s were among the first people to confront the problems of trust, intimacy, privacy, and civility that characterize life online today. That grand telematics experiment is over, but it still has lessons to teach the many engineers and computer scientists struggling to make the Web a better place. This article appears in the July 2017 print issue as "The French Connection Machine." From Your Site Articles * From Trash to Treasure: How to Resurrect a Minitel Terminal - IEEE ... > * Log On Like It's 1985: A Fragment of Minitel Returns - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Minitel Research Lab, USA > * France says farewell to the Minitel - the little box that connected a ... > * Minitel | The MIT Press > Keep reading... Show less Stay ahead of the latest trends in technology. Become an IEEE member. This article is for IEEE members only. Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of Spectrum's articles, podcasts, and special reports. Learn more - BECOME A MEMBERSIGN IN Membership includes: * Get unlimited access to IEEE Spectrum content * Follow your favorite topics to create a personalized feed of IEEE Spectrum content * Save Spectrum articles to read later * Network with other technology professionals * Establish a professional profile * Create a group to share and collaborate on projects * Discover IEEE events and activities * Join and participate in discussions The Institute Topic News Type Learn About the Candidates Running for 2023 President-Elect They are all experienced IEEE leaders Joanna Goodrich Joanna Goodrich is the assistant editor of The Institute, covering the work and accomplishments of IEEE members and IEEE and technology-related events. She has a master's degree in health communications from Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J. 3h 5 min read ieee election ieee president elect ieee president elect candidates IEEE News The IEEE Board of Directors has nominated Life Fellow Thomas Coughlin and Senior Members Kathleen Kramer and Maike Luiken as candidates for IEEE president-elect. IEEE Life Fellow Kazuhiro Kosuge is seeking to be a petition candidate. Other members who want to become a petition candidate still may do so by submitting their intention to elections@ieee.org by 8 April. The winner of this year's election will serve as IEEE president in 2024. Life Fellow Thomas Coughlin Nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors Portrait of a white haired smiling man wearing glasses and a suit Tom CoughlinHarry Who Photography Coughlin is founder and president of Coughlin Associates, in San Jose, Calif., which provides market and technology analysis as well as data storage, memory technology, and business consulting services. He has more than 40 years of experience in the data storage industry and has been a consultant for more than 20 years. He has been granted six patents. Before starting his own company, Coughlin held senior leadership positions in Ampex, Micropolis, and SyQuest. He is the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which is in its second edition. He is a regular contributor on digital storage for the Forbes blog and other news outlets. In 2019 he was IEEE-USA president as well as IEEE Region 6 director. He also was chair of the IEEE New Initiatives and Public Visibility committees. He was vice president of operations and planning for the IEEE Consumer Technology Society and served as general chair of the 2011 Sections Congress in San Francisco. He is an active member of the IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section, which he chaired, and has been involved with several societies, standards groups, and the IEEE Future Directions committee. As a distinguished lecturer for the Consumer Technology Society and IEEE Student Activities, he has spoken on digital storage in consumer electronics, digital storage and memory for artificial intelligence, and how students can make IEEE their "professional home." Coughlin is a member of the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) honor society. He has received several recognitions including the 2020 IEEE Member and Geographic Activities Leadership Award. Coughlin is active in several other professional organizations including the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the Storage Networking Industry Association. Senior Member Kathleen Kramer Nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors Portrait of a smiling blond woman Kathleen KramerJT MacMillan Kramer is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of San Diego, where she served as chair of the EE department and director of engineering from 2004 to 2013. As director she provided academic leadership for all of the university's engineering programs. Her areas of interest include multisensor data fusion, intelligent systems, and cybersecurity in aerospace systems. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications. Kramer has worked for several companies including Bell Communications Research, Hewlett-Packard, and Viasat. She served as the 2017-2018 director of IEEE Region 6 and was the 2019-2021 IEEE secretary. In that position, she chaired the IEEE Governance Committee and helped make major changes including centralizing ethics conduct reporting, strengthened processes to handle ethics and member conduct, and improved the process used to periodically review each of the individual committees and major boards of the IEEE. She has held several leadership positions in the IEEE San Diego Section, including chair, secretary, and treasurer. Her first position with the section was advisor to the IEEE University of San Diego Student Branch. Kramer is an active leader within the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society. She currently heads its technical operations panel on cybersecurity. From 2016 to 2018 she served as vice president of education. She is a distinguished lecturer for the society and has given talks on signal processing, multisensor data fusion, and neural systems. Kramer serves as an IEEE commissioner within ABET, the global accrediting organization for academic programs in applied science, computing, engineering, and technology. She has contributed to several advances for graduate programs, cybersecurity, mechatronics, and robotics. Life Fellow Kazuhiro Kosuge Seeking petition candidacy Portrait of a smiling man in a suit with dark hair Kazuhiro Kozuge Majesty Professional Photo Kosuge is a professor of robotic systems at the University of Hong Kong's electrical and electronic engineering department. He has been conducting robotics research for more than 35 years, has published more than 390 technical papers, and has been granted more than 70 patents. He began his engineering career as a research staff member in the production engineering department of Japanese automotive manufacturer Denso. After two years, he joined the Tokyo Institute of Technology's department of control engineering as a research associate. In 1989 and 1990, he was a visiting research scientist at MIT. After he returned to Japan, he began his academic career at Nagoya University as an associate professor. In 1995 Kosuge left Nagoya and joined Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan, as a faculty member in the machine intelligence and system engineering department. He is currently director of the university's Transformative AI and Robotics International Research Center. An IEEE-HKN member, he has held several IEEE leadership positions including 2020 vice president of Technical Activities, 2015-2016 Division X director, and 2010-2011 president of the Robotics and Automation Society. He has served in several advisory roles for Japan, including science advisor to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology's Research Promotion Bureau from 2010 to 2014. He was a senior program officer of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2007 to 2010. In 2005 he was appointed as a Fellow of the Japan Science and Technology Agency's Center for Research and Development Strategy. Among his honors and awards are the purple-ribbon Medal of Honor in 2018 from the emperor of Japan. To sign Kosuge's petition, click here. Senior Member Maike Luiken Nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors Portrait of a smiling woman with grey hair and glasses Maike Luiken Heather O'Neil/Photos Unlimited Luiken's career in academia spans 30 years, and she has more than 20 years of experience in industry. She is co-owner of Carbovate Development, in Sarnia, Ont., Canada, and is managing director of its R&D department. She also is an adjunct research professor at Western University in London, also in Ontario. Her areas of interest include power and energy, information and communications technology, how progress in one field enables advances in other disciplines and sectors, and how the deployment of technologies contributes--or doesn't contribute--to sustainable development. In 2001 she joined the National Capital Institute of Telecommunications in Ottawa as vice president of research alliances. There she was responsible for a wide area test network and its upgrades. While at the company, she founded two research alliance networks that spanned across industry, business, government, and academia in the areas of wireless and photonics. She joined Lambton College, in Sarnia, in 2005 and served as dean of its technology school as well as of applied research and innovation. She led the expansion of applied research conducted at the school and helped Lambton become one of the top three research colleges in Canada. In 2013 she founded the Bluewater Technology Access Centre (now the Lambton Manufacturing Innovation Centre). It provides applied research services to industry while offering students and faculty opportunities to develop solutions for industry problems. Luiken, an IEEE-HKN member, was last year's vice president of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities. She was president of IEEE Canada in 2018 and 2019, when she also served as Region 7 director. She has served on numerous IEEE boards and committees including the IEEE Board of Directors, the Canadian Foundation, Member and Geographic Activities, and the Internet Initiative. From Your Site Articles * Saifur Rahman Is 2022 IEEE President-Elect - IEEE Spectrum > Keep Reading | Show less Robotics News Type Topic Unitree's AlienGo Quadruped Can Now Wield a Lightsaber Just what the world needs? Evan Ackerman Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes. 5h 2 min read A small quadrupedal robot with an arm on its back holds a blue light saber against the red light saber of a human in a mask dressed in black legged robots unitree robotics Unitree Robotics, well known for providing affordable legged robots along with questionable Star Wars-themed promotional videos, has announced a brand new, custom-made, 6-degree-of-freedom robotic arm intended to be mounted on the back of its larger quadrupeds. Also, it will save humanity from Sith from Mars, or something. This, we should point out, is not the first time Unitree has used The Force in a promotional video, although their first attempt was very Dark Side and the second attempt seemed to be mostly an apology for the first. The most recent video here seems to have landed squarely on the Light Side, which is good, but I'm kinda confused about the suggestion that the baddies come from Mars (?) and most humans are killed (??) and the answer is some sort of "Super AI" (???). I guess Unitree will have to release more products so that we can learn how this story ends. Anyway, about the arm: there are two versions, the Z1 Air and the Z1 Pro, built with custom motors using harmonic reducers for low backlash and torque control. They are almost exactly the same, except that the Pro weighs 4.3kg rather than 4.1kg, and has a payload of 3-5kg rather than 2kg. Max reach is 0.7m, with 0.1mm repeatability. The price for the Air version is "about $6600," and it's compatible with "other mobile robots" as well. It's important to note that just having an arm on a robot is arguably the easy part--it's using the arm that's the hard part, in the sense that you have to program it to do what you need it to do. A strong, lightweight, and well-integrated arm certainly makes that job easier, but it remains to be seen what will be involved in getting the arm to do useful stuff. I don't want to draw too many comparisons to Boston Dynamics here, but Spot's arm comes with autonomous and semi-autonomous behaviors built-in, allowing otherwise complex actions to be leveraged by commercial end users. It's not yet clear how Unitree is handling this. We're at the point now with robots in general that in many cases, software is the differentiator rather than hardware, and you get what you pay for. That said, sometimes what you want or need is a more affordable system to work with, and remember that Unitree's AlienGo costs under $10k. There's certainly a demand for affordable hardware, and while it may not be ready to be dropped into commercial applications just yet, it's good to see options like these on the market. From Your Site Articles * Boston Dynamics' Spot Robot Dog Goes on Sale - IEEE Spectrum > * This Robotics Startup Wants to Be the Boston Dynamics of China ... > * Unitree's Go1 Robot Dog Looks Pretty Great, Costs Just USD $2700 ... > Related Articles Around the Web * Unitree Robotics - Yu Shu Ke Ji Guan Wang > Keep Reading | Show less Trending Stories The most-read stories on IEEE Spectrum right now Robotics News Type Topic Unitree's AlienGo Quadruped Can Now Wield a Lightsaber 5h 2 min read A small quadrupedal robot with an arm on its back holds a blue light saber against the red light saber of a human in a mask dressed in black Biomedical Topic News Type Zapping the Brain and Nerves Could Treat Long COVID 05 Jan 2022 7 min read illustration of head showing brain and covid virus symbols in background The Institute Topic Type Article Sensors Why IoT Sensors Need Standards 11 Jan 2022 3 min read A photo of white gloved hands holding a circuit board. The Institute Topic News Type Learn About the Candidates Running for 2023 President-Elect 3h 5 min read Topic Type Sensors News Physicists Spin Up Quantum Tornadoes 8h 4 min read A string of blobs. The blobs are seen in an inset, to have tiny holes, signifying vortices, arranged from left to right, each one marked with an "x" Topic Transportation Type News Jet Fighter With a Steering Wheel: Inside the Augmented-Reality Car HUD 12 Jan 2022 4 min read View of an intersection at night. An overlay shows arrows for turning left as well as car and road information. The Institute Topic Artificial Intelligence Type Article Deep Learning Can't Be Trusted, Brain Modeling Pioneer Says 30 Dec 2021 4 min read Photo of a man in glasses and a blue checkered shirt. The Institute Topic Type Careers Profile Building Better Qubits 07 Jan 2022 4 min read A photo of a woman in glasses and blue jacket standing in front of a monitor.