beachycove
Well-known member
A recent eBay purchase of a Lucent Wavelan Turbo Silver PCMCIA has given me wireless Newton 2100 connectivity for the first time since I began to use a Newton in 1997-98. This was not for internet access (why bother?), but for data exchange with my OS9 Pismo. Both are working machines, used daily, and I needed a more convenient way of connecting the two.
It took me a while to get the Wavelan card working and a connection established, as all (and I mean ALL) the on-line "how-to" guides are, of course, obsessed with the web or with OSX connectivity rather than with classic Appletalk over wireless. So, for posterity, the essence of it is that you need to set up a NAMED computer to computer network on the MacOS machine, and enter this NAME in the SSID in the relevant Newton connection slip. Then give Newton Connection Utilities plenty of RAM to work with (I increased the mimimum allocation by 1MB and the preferred allocation to 8MB as opposed to the stock 4MB), as otherwise you get persistent Type 3 errors. Once these simple steps are done, it works perfectly.
I had connected before by using the dongle and a PhoneNet connection on the Newton, ethertalk on the Pismo, and a bridge machine running Appletalk Internet Router (zones), but the wireless connection is a good deal less complicated and is very noticeably faster.
So, we have a happy vintage technology user here. I can now follow my schedule not only on the Newton, but also using Claris Organizer 2 on the Pismo.
It took me a while to get the Wavelan card working and a connection established, as all (and I mean ALL) the on-line "how-to" guides are, of course, obsessed with the web or with OSX connectivity rather than with classic Appletalk over wireless. So, for posterity, the essence of it is that you need to set up a NAMED computer to computer network on the MacOS machine, and enter this NAME in the SSID in the relevant Newton connection slip. Then give Newton Connection Utilities plenty of RAM to work with (I increased the mimimum allocation by 1MB and the preferred allocation to 8MB as opposed to the stock 4MB), as otherwise you get persistent Type 3 errors. Once these simple steps are done, it works perfectly.
I had connected before by using the dongle and a PhoneNet connection on the Newton, ethertalk on the Pismo, and a bridge machine running Appletalk Internet Router (zones), but the wireless connection is a good deal less complicated and is very noticeably faster.
So, we have a happy vintage technology user here. I can now follow my schedule not only on the Newton, but also using Claris Organizer 2 on the Pismo.
