networking classic hardware

On Sat, 27 Oct 2012, Tom Sparks wrote: Ok, having re-read the entire thread, I have a better idea of what you are after. For printing, I used a multi-port parallel autoswitch with its inputs connected to the different computers I wanted to print from. It's output was connected to a parallel to serial adapter that I had connected to a Linux machine which ran lpd. The Linux machine could queue anything I wanted to print and send it out to the printers I had on my network. This worked pretty well, but it took awhile to get all the settings correct. The only downside was that I had to manually change which printer I wanted to print to via the Linux system. In thinking about it now, I guess I could have used a manual switchbox connected between the parallel to serial adapter and multiple serial ports on the Linux system to select different printers, but I didn't think of that at the time. As for serial connections, if you just wanted to use the machines as terminals, a basic terminal server would do the job, but since you also want to be able to transfer files, you'd need something more flexible. I'd probably recommend using a multi-port serial adapter (Boca, Stallion, Cyclades, Digi, etc) with the Linux machine. Standalone serial device servers such as the Lantronix UDS10 probably aren't going to do what you want (or at least not easily) if you want to transfer files and data between the classic system and the Linux computer. For inbound telnet connections /to/ a system, devices such as the UDS10 can work pretty well though.