I suppose one could emulate the telephone carrier dial tone and ring back
tone with a third device, then the modems would just act like a direct
connection after their handshake?
I'm so glad there are others who want to accurately recreate the whole user
experience!
=]
On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 10:06 AM Tapley, Mark via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Jan 16, 2018, at 4:38 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk
<
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 08:19:34AM +0000, Martin
Meiner via cctech wrote:
[...]
> Does anybody know if there exists such anaccess-number where this
conversion
> is already made, or is there a small deviceon
the market that allows on
one
side
connect to a dial-up modem and on theother side to the terminal and
doing the ASCII conversion stand-alone?
I do this routinely, albeit with a terminal emulator and ssh session
rather
than a physical terminal and modem.
My "small device" is a Debian Linux box in Germany on which I read mail
and
Usenet, do IRC, etc. I wrote a trivial Perl
script called "google" that
inspects its arguments, and constructs a search URL which it passes to
elinks,
a text-mode web browser. A similarly-trivial
"wikipedia" script could be
written. Some web sites such as Twitter recognise the elinks User-Agent
and
switch to a non-Javascript "mobile"
site. FaceBook doesn't work, but
there's
nothing of value there anyway.
A physical serial connection is simpler than a pair of modems, so start
with
that. Run a null modem cable between your
terminal and COM1 on the Linux
box,
edit the inittab to add a getty for /dev/ttyS0
with the appropriate
terminal
type (there's usually a commented-out
example) and reload init. A similar
principle applies to USB-serial dongles, but they're a bit unreliable so
try
to
use a proper onboard serial port if possible.
Linux's "vt100" terminal type differs somewhat from DEC's in that it
includes
command sequences that an original VT100 does not
and some full-screen
applications will render incorrectly, but a VT220 worked OK when I last
tried,
back in 2003-ish. If the render is occasionally
off-by-one -- you'll
know it
when you see it -- it means that the terminal is
configured for 24 lines
and
the Unix box for 25 lines or vice-versa. Use the
terminal's settings menu
and/or tweak $LINES/$COLUMNS on the Linux box.
Dialup is a refinement of this. You will need to use "mgetty" instead
which
understands Hayes commands and other modem
control signals, but it might
not be
installed by default.
Note that 15 years ago we were running sysvinit, and now we have the
Brave New
World of systemd, which is overcomplicated GUI
junk and probably doesn't
support serial terminals. If you decide to build this, find a Linux
distribution without systemd, or use something like FreeBSD.
I?m not even that advanced, I?m just trying to get OmniWeb on my NeXTStep
3,3 machine to hit wikipedia. Wikipedia seems to have gone to https, and
for some reason that is not working. I can do ssh and sftp from that
machine, so I must be doing something wrong with the Omniweb settings.
- Mark
--