I picked up a 280c at a car boot sale recently and after replacing the HD and refurbishing the battery it is a surprisingly useful laptop which lasts for a good hour or so on the battery, now I believe it has a built in modem but the connector is a mini din like the serial ports though I am led to believe it requires a special cable which you can plug into a telephone line, are these cables available still, or is there any information on them?
Also can OS 7.5 communicate via a GSM mobile phone with a serial cable to access the internet on the road.
Pretty much all current cell phones don't go through the computer's modem but have a built in modem (that is if they can be used at all). So to connect one you need a serial cable that's specific to the modem. Currently phones either use USB or serial. You can't use USB but the serial should work with the 280C. Odds are any cable you buy will have a DE-9 serial connector. You would then need an adapter from this connector to a MiniDIN8 Mac serial connector.
I currently use a USB to serial cable with my lap top. Oddly there is a USB port built into the phone but apparently the interface is odd and the vendor (LG) doesn't provide a Mac driver. So this cable has a USB to serial convertor in the middle.
But I previously made the connection using a Motorola StarTAC using a DE-9 serial cable. That and a MiniDIN8 to DE-9 adapter did the trick. A common source of the adapter was Palm, for use with the Pilot, et al. I doubt they still make them but they are probably available on E-Bay.
Check with your cell provider to see what kind of data service they have. While I can use the phone with my regular ISP as a dial up connection Verizon has a free service that is quite a bit quicker at connecting and just as fast a data rate (14,400).
--
Clark Martin
Redwood City, CA, USA
Macintosh / Internet Consulting
"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"
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