At 14:49 -0500 8/10/11, Ivan Kowalenko wrote:
>Hello all. I just read about someone over at Tumblr who had managed to rig up 
>an old VT220 terminal to work with his Mac Pro   and some more.

I use Apple's MPW on this 8500 running OS 9.1 and I occasionally do the same 
thing on an SE/30 running 7.5.  MPW is a shell application that is based on the 
C-shell of UNIX of old.  It doesn't act as an interface to a kernel as in UNIX. 
Rather it offers kernel-like commands that are executed by the application 
itself. It also serves as a text editor built for writing C or perl.  I love 
it. But it's not UNIX as is OX10 at least before it became a matter of 
gesturing rather than commanding.

The terminal emulators of old for the classic OS absolutely depend on a serial 
port that needs to be connected to a serial port on the UNIX box or a modem 
that can get there with a transmission link. Doing it using ethernet between OS 
7 or even 8 and OS 10 after 10.3.9 is impossible because OS X has disabled 
AppleFile protocol over ethernet. For me the emulators stopped working when I 
retired and lost my dial-up account on a Dec VAX.

On OS 9 there is MacSSH PPC which will allow a remote logon to OS-X and Linux 
over ethernet. It does work but it's not the text editor that the MPW shell is. 
MPW offers a remote ToolServer that can run on another classic box and connect 
using AppleTalk.  It will not run on any OS-X box.

There are some Mac:SSH application versions for OS 7 and 8 but I have tried 
them without success.

Stairways Software has Interarchy, an FTP and HTTP client that will run on OS  
7,8,9 boxes and communicates for file transfer with OS-X. There is also 
NetPresenz from the same company that will serve FTP and some HTTP while 
running on OS 7,8,9.  I use both for communicating between Linux and OS-X and 
my favorite MPW on OS 9. But it's not a login shell emulator.

My guess it that the VT220 got hooked up with a connection to an OS-x USB port 
with a serial to USB conversion adapter.  It might work with a cable to an 
older Mac with an RS422 Printer/Modem port. The cable could be tricky though 
because converters don't always honor the negative signal requirement of RS 
232. Ask if you want to try that. I did come up with a way to talk to a Garmin 
GPS receiver with RS422 on an SE/30.

It's also conceivable that a an old 1200 baud modem could be used to 
communicate with a Mac that has a built-in modem.  My G4, running 10.3.9 for 
reasons above, has a place for that but it appears to be limited to FAX only at 
least with Qwest as a telco. Hard wired to another modem?  I haven't tried.

These lists have some activity and you might get a detailed answer to a 
question.

List-Subscribe: <http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/mpw-dev>, 
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=subscribe> (die hard MPW users)

List-Subscribe: <http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/usb>, 
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=subscribe>  (Current developers 
using USB)


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