modern serial terminal

M H Stein wrote: That's exactly what I do. I've got a couple of old mini notebooks that I use as terminals. They're worthless for anything else as they're ancient and would only run something like win95, so I set'em up to boot up in Hyperterm. Now, my main "terminal" is my trusty HP LX200 plamtop, which I use as a console for things like Sun servers when the odd datacenter trip is required by the job. It's small, tiny, and is happy to use 2xAA batteries, and has a built in terminal program, just barely a vt102 clone, but good enough. (It's also got Lotus123, and quicken for DOS, etc.) If you hunt one of these down be sure to get a serial cable for it, as they're non-standard. If you've got some sub/mini notebook around with a serial port, even if the batteries are shot, rig it so it boots into something like Telix, minicom, or hyperterminal, and you're set. No need to mess with ROMs or what not. If you really want to get rid of the hard drive, or if the hard drive is dead and beyond replacing, you could look into replacing it with some sort of flash memory. Some of those will boot off flash, if they do, you're all set. Boot up DOS and Telix, and rock on, or better yet throw a mini-linux distro on there and fire up minicom - no need for XWin. If you must, you can boot Linux from a disk-on-chip. See: http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8844506693.html For DOS Telix see, but it's expensive, as compared with a mini-linux distro with minicom + lrzsz. see: http://www.telix.com/delta/deltacom/tfd/index.html