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 < [email protected]> wrote: > On Jan 16, 2018, at 4:38 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk < > [email protected]> 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
