Re: Finally making use of PowerLisp despite several **horrible** bugs it has

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:24:56 -0700, seeWebInstead@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:

I'm pretty sure my laptop doesn't have any SCSI card, and I don't
think there's any room to fit it in there even if I had the money
to buy one, so that method wouldn't work for me.
My best bet for transferring large files (300-500k each) from my
Mac to the laptop would probably be to buy a new diskette drive for
the laptop, if I had the money,
From: p...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
Your best bet would be to use the serial interfaces. Find, buy or
make a serial cable.

None of those are options for me at this time.

I haven't followed the previous thread(s) so please forgive and ignore
me if you've heard all this before.


Many years ago I had the money to buy the EIA 25-pin connectors, and
I had some scrap telephone wire, so I was able to make a modem cable.
But that's in storage, and it was for EIA at both ends, whereas
neither my Macintosh nor my laptop uses that kind of connector.
(Mac uses DIN, and laptop uses something else I can't figure out.)

Seriously you can't afford a $20 cable? You can make one yourself for
about $10.

Laptop serial ports are Dsub-9M (aka DB-9M). The complementary
Dsub-9F (aka DB-9F) connector is like $1 retail at Radio Shack. DIN-8
connectors are harder to find, but you can get a ready made Mac M/M
serial cable for under $10 online, cut one end off and put the Dsub-9
on.

If you want to connect the computers together, you need to make what's
called a NULL-modem (aka DTE/DTE) cable - that's a cable where the
signals are swapped end to end. Connecting a computer to a modem
requires a normal (aka DTE/DCE) cable. You can Google the pin-outs
for the various cables easily enough.


Transfering 500KB at 112000 b/s takes about 45s.

If you have appropriate software at both ends, and the hardware
handshake is correct so that both ends believe the other end is
online.

Also simple. Linux needs to see DCD active but there is a software
switch to get around that if DCD isn't connected - see stty in the man
pages.


With a serial connection, you will also be able to configure PPP
over it, and then share your Internet connection from the Mac, so
you don't need the modem in the laptop.

My Mac doesn't have any InterNet connection, and isn't capable of
it in the first place. 8 MB of RAM just isn't enough for any
off-the-shelf PPP service together with Web browser etc.
When I tried it in 1998, it thrashed so badly that it took 20
minutes to download just one Web page and 5 minutes just to scroll
locally when I clicked the MS-IE scroll bar with the mouse.

If you have System 7 or later, you've got PPP built in. There used to
be a PPP stack for 6.5, but I can't remember who made it. There was
also SLIP which you could use between your computers but probably not
for internet access - I don't think any ISPs support SLIP any more.

PPP is not a memory problem - a decent PPP stack takes about 40KB, a
really well written one closer to 20KB. SLIP is even smaller. I used
to use dial-up internet over PPP on a 1MB PC running Desqview (an
early multitasking shell).

Dial-up surfing need not be excruciating. If you can do without the
graphics and animations you can use a text-mode browser. MacLynx is a
early Mac port of the (Unix) Lynx browser that will run easily in 4MB.
Development of the MacOS version stopped around 1997 and the latest
was technically a beta, but I used it way back when and it was very
stable. I looked briefly to see if I could find it but had no luck.
Olivier Gutknecht did the Lynx port to MacOS (his mail is "olg at
no-distance dot net"), you might email him and see if he still has a
copy of the old version or knows where you can get one.

For Linux there are current versions of Lynx. There are also two
competing text-mode browsers, one called "Links" and another called
"w3m", that you might look at. I don't think any of the current
browsers will run on MacOS, they need OS-X if anything.


Now if I could simply connect the serial port of my laptop to the
external modem that I normally use with my Mac for VT-100 emulator,
I might be able to run PPP directly from my laptop. But I seem to
remember that I already tried connecting the serial port of the
laptop to the modem and running the VT100 emulator on the laptop,
and couldn't get it to work, not even dial the phone, so I don't
think I have the hardware expertise needed to connect the laptop
serial port to *anything* and make the connection work.

Are you sure the laptop serial port works? If you have a NULL-modem
cable, you can test it with the Mac, just fire up the comm software on
both sides, select no handshaking or software handshaking and see if
you can type both ways. If that works, try turning on RTS/CTS
handshaking - RTS/CTS is typically the only mode connected in a Mac
<-> PC cable.


I wish there was somebody in the Sunnyvale area who knew Linux well
enough to show me how to diagnose whether the problem with the
modem is the modem itself or the OS, so I'd know whether it'd be
worth my time/energy to spend an hour each way commuting by public
transit to Fry's Electronics to buy a new modem that I can't afford
in the first place.

If the modem works with the Mac then the problem is with the laptop:
in the cable, the serial port, or the software configuration.

George
.

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