Apple //e Trickery-ness!

[coius]

So I turn 27 on January 9th (tomorrow for reference from the posting of this topic). and I decided to do something different. Since most people i know are going to be at work (and I being a student and home business person, I have some downtime) I decided to lay out what think Will be a fun project. I am have a spare machine, and an Apple //e I am going to make work together in magical TTY Serial command-line love.

The setup I have: (even though I know it's been done before)

1x Apple //e (Enhanced) Platinum

128KB RAM (64KB RAM, 64KB Expansion).

Floppy Controller with 2 Disk 2 5.25" Floppy drives.

Stack of floppies

SuperSerial card with null-modem cable.

Color Composite Monitor //e (Yup my coveted color composite monitor!)



Linux Box

Generic Gigabyte GA-M68M-S2P (rev 2.3) Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.8Ghz AM2 CPU w/ 2MB L2 Cache

2GB PC2-800 RAM

GeForce 8400GS 256MB PCI-E video card

250GB Samsung SpinPoint HDD w/ 8MB Cache and 7200RPM (SATA)

Apple OEM'd DVD-RW from PowerMac G4 MDD

Dell Inspiron 2300 Case (hacked board in with necessary mods to get power button and lights working)





Gonna attempt with Ubuntu Linux 11.04 Alternate.

I have always wanted to play with a terminal pretending I am time-sharing with a mainframe with other users. Sadly I am not old enough or priviledged enough to use a real mainframe or share in the bliss of the 70's with the big baheamoth machines, but this will get me close enough. I will catalog my processor to show I can do it, and hopefully one of the posts on this topic will be from Lynx on the Apple II at (maybe) 115.6Kbps terminal speed. I think I found a way to do it on Ubuntu. I will have to see how it works out. I have all the software now (including Modem.MGR which is needed) and I am following part of the instructions from another site.

If I am going to spend my b-day alone. I am going to do it the way I want! Dangit!

 

[highlandcattle]

Happy birthday ) . Looks like a fun project somehing I have always wanted to do aswell!

 

[theos911]

I've been wanting to do something similar with these instructions. http://www.dataswamp.net/apple2eserialterm/

Keep us posted on how it goes. :approve: (There is an Apple ][ smiley floating around here somewhere that should be added to the smiley list. *cough*cough*)

 

[coius]

Unfortunately, I haven't had as much time today as I thought. I ended up having an MRI scheduled that I had to go, that took about 45 minutes to do. After that my mom took me out for dinner at red lobster for my b-day. I will get to it later tonight, but I got debian installed (Ubuntu has a broken serial TTY) so I will start on that later. Currently wrapping up some work on my mom's machines doing backups and updates on my mom's acer laptop (as well as letting that food rest from dinner. Wow for $15 at red lobster, that was a heck of a lot of food. If you get that four coarse meal, I suggest the alfredo shrimp and scalop pasta (garlic too!) with the baked potato bacon soup. that's awesome!

I will start on it later. I will probably have it done by sun up with a video if I can get it done by tonight.

also on that link, that's where I saw how to set it up. I think I will have fun with it. Pretend I have to time-share with a mainframe filled with other people

 

[coius]

Well. Sucess, sort of. It's introducing a lot of weird characters. which makes me think it's not on the right tty terminal type (possibly VT100 instead of VT102) So I need to figure out how to get it set a bit different

 

[coius]

and this is how you do it! This is so wicked. I am tying this post from the Apple //e right now. To prove it in a few minutes I will be posting the picture of this post. I had the minor snafu when I forgot to set the terminal emulation on the Apple II to VT220 (the linux box was already set) so I had to set it after I connected. It's awesome to see 68kmla on a machine so old. I am going to play with bumping up the terminal speed to 19200 but I am not sure if the slow part now is the apple IIe or the baud speed of the serial connection. This is such an awesome project. I got it done 31 minutes late after my b-day but this was such as awesome project and had a lot of fun with it. screw contiki, this is the best way with the most horsepower compared to the contiki, and it might be the cheapest solution for getting an apple IIe online. Cheers all. pic will be posted in a few!

 

[coius]

I have a video going up on youtube of it booting the system. I set the baud rate at 9600 and I will post a link to the debian article I used to setup the port on debian. I ran into a snag on the new ubuntu which has disabled the serial output for TTY/Console which made me abandon the ubuntu route. Has to do with a package update they did around ubuntu 7 that caused a bug in it. Also when setting it up, I had an issue where I didn't have VT220 set, so I had to re-read the article and figured out after I connected that I needed to set the terminal emulation. Keep in mind these instructions (except apple II part) will work with VT220 terminals as a whole. Altogether, I am very happy how it worked out and I look forward to playing with it more in the future. The keyboard on the Apple II is hard to type on unless you are significantly higher than the keyboard. so make sure either your apple is lower than your elbows or your chair can go pretty high. if anyone else gets it working, post your pics/vids too!

 

[theos911]

As best as I have observed, the slowness is the data rate.

 

[coius]

Video of it in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbLHVIzrEY4

 

[tmtomh]

Nice work - very cool, and the video really shows what it can do.

 

[H3NRY]

Excellent! The "slowness" is due to the serial baud rate, it looks like. To get the REAL feel of a remote log-in to a mainframe in the '70s, set your baud rates to 110 or 300 baud. 300 baud was the fastest Ma Bell (the monopoly phone company back then) allowed on her wires. You had to have special permission to wire anything to the phone system in those days, so most modems were acoustic, with rubber cups you stuck a telephone handset into. If you had a wired modem, you had to pay extra, and AT&T assumed you were the size of General Electric and charged accordingly. Networking didn't really exist, but that didn't stop home computer users from setting up bulletin boards and exchanging files once the Disk ][ came out. We even did a few file transfers before that by playing cassettes over the phone, then loading them into our Apples. Needless to say, screens contained a whole lot less data back then than they do today. 300 baud, after all is only 30 characters per second, so it took almost 3 seconds to send a single 80-character line on screen.

I ought to try a TTY connection to my Mac one of these days just to see how it goes.

 

[Dog Cow]

Back in the day (the late 70s), Call-APPLE had a product known as the Apple Box. It was an interface from a phone line to the cassette ports on the Apple II.

 

[Brooklyn]

Amazing!

 

[Dog Cow]

Read all about it:

Another of the earliest devices designed for the Apple II came from Apple Pugetsound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.). They were involved in distributing Integer BASIC programs on cassette to members of the group. To make it easier to send those programs to the person responsible for duplicating the cassette, Darrell Aldrich designed a means of sending the programs over the telephone lines. There were no modems available at the time, so his “Apple Box” was attached to the phone line with alligator clips and then plugged into the cassette port on the Apple II. To send a program, you first called up the person who was to receive it and got the computers on each end connected to the Apple Box. The sender then used the SAVE command in BASIC to tell the computer to save a program to tape. In actuality, the program was being “saved” through the cassette “out” port to the Apple Box, and onto the phone line connected. At the other end of that phone line, the data went into the other Apple Box, which was connected to the cassette “in” port on the other Apple II. That computer was executing the LOAD command in BASIC to “load” the program from the Apple Box. A.P.P.L.E. sold about twenty of these Apple Boxes at $10 apiece.