Google, Wikipedia directly on ASCII terminal?

[Anders Nelson]

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
>
>
> --
--
Anders Nelson
+1 (517) 775-6129
www.erogear.com