Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Tandy Model 102 to PowerBook G4' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Tandy Model 102 to PowerBook G4
Authored by: victory on Jul 05, '07 03:52:03PM
Very neat!

A few years back I did a similar hookup between my (then) new 17" PowerBook G4 and an ancient Tandy Model 102 laptop, also using a Keyspan USB/Serial adapter and homemade null-model adapter. Things were made a bit simpler by the fact that the Model 102 includes terminal app built right into ROM.

I honestly can't say that I did it for any other reason than the novelty of seeing two of my notebooks talk to each other across a technology gulf of 15+ years. The Model 102 ran at 2.4 MHz with 32kb of RAM and a 40x8 char B/W display. My PowerBook runs at 1GHz with 1Gb of RAM and a 1440x900px 24-bit color display, meaning that it's roughly 400x faster and has 30,000x the memory capacity.

Strange. I don't feel I've become 30,000x (or even 400x) more productive since that time... =)

----

Just so this reply post contains some information of value, I might add that using a USBSerial adapter (Keyspan's or otherwise) under OSX can be quite useful if you have the need to work with legacy hardware such as old routers or even to do 'headless' installs/management on platforms that support it the use of a com/serial port (e.g. OpenBSD)

[ Reply to This | # ]