Re: Apple II with ProTERM 3.1 OS X/Unix Serial Terminal

[Hugh Hood <hughhood@earthlink.net>]

Blake,

This topic seemed to take a strange twist, so I'm glad you weighed in. I had
thought maybe my original post was less than coherent. And, perhaps it was.

Anyway, in fact, I did consult your great article, as well as Paul's.

Thanks for taking the time to post your details and screen shots. Seeing is
believing, or at least it was before Photoshop. <g>

Also very helpful was this from Mac OS X Hints:

<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030724135653825>

Of course, I should have been satisfied with 9600 baud and software
handshaking, because, in my effort to achieve a 57600 baud (ProTERM 3.1 IIGS
driver) RTS/CTS handshaking setup, I ended up spending an embarrassing
number of obsessive hours fiddling with Unix /etc/gettytab, termios, stty,
etc/ttys, serial flags, /dev/tty*, terminfo and all. Being my first
experience with Unix, this was _slow_.

Most of the articles mention modifying the /etc/ttys file to use the
local.9600 or the serial.9600 entries from the gettytab file, with the VT100
terminal type. Unfortunately, changing to other parameters usually requires
opening /etc/gettytab and making a few additions to the entries, usually to
add support for other baud rates, but also to change some serial comm
parameters.

And speaking of supported terminal types, type in the command "toe | more"
at your Unix prompt and you'll be presented with dozens of terminal types in
addition to vt100, including appleII and appleIIgs, as well as many vt***,
commodore, amiga, and atari, lisa and linux.

In the end, as you know, it's very satisfying to have an Apple II (a IIGS in
my case) _control_ a modern OS X (Unix) Mac computer.

(BTW, I would contrast this merely to hooking two computers to each other
via a null modem cable and running comm programs on both ends in order to
transfer files. Heck, I think the Guru Don Lancaster did that with two
abacuses/abacata/abaci and a string back in the '60s. Most would agree that
there's nothing new there. And, to be honest, I suppose there's nothing all
that 'new' about setting up an Apple II as a Unix serial terminal).

While it is _neat_ to be able to run Lynx, Pine, etc... from an Apple II, I
must confess that the real reason I set this up was to overcome OS X's
current lack of ProDOS file system capability and lack of support for
AppleTalk file sharing (as of 10.4 Tiger). Even prior to Tiger, though,
there were issues about OS X's AppleTalk being read-only from the Apple II
side. Attempting to write files, forked or not, from the Apple II to the
Mac, would produce errors. Yuk.

In our office, we have a real need to transfer files (generally .txt and
'awp' files) between the Apple IIGS and Macs. This setup (using the Zmodem
protocol) handles this nicely, and the Mac user never has to do a thing
other than look on his/her Desktop for the file that was transferred, or
alternatively, placing the file on the Desktop to be transferred to the
Apple II. The Apple IIGS user runs the show with ProTERM controlling the
sending/receiving on the Apple II end, while the Unix programs rz and sz
work behind the scenes to handle things on the Mac end.

When ProTERM starts a Zmodem send, the Unix program rz (receive zmodem) is
automatically started on the Mac. When it's time to receive a file on the
Apple II, you merely type 'sz <filename>' on the serial terminal, and
ProTERM automatically starts its Zmodem receive. Not bad. Also, sz will auto
convert the line delimiters back to CR/LF if you add -a.

For others wanting to try this, remember that on the Mac, the Unix programs
rz and sz are not included with the Darwin install. You'll need to get and
build the program 'lrzsz' first. MacPorts or Fink make this simple. On other
**nixes, these programs may already be included, though.

Finally, as I've probably mentioned in prior posts, I _really_ enjoy working
entirely within 8-bit AppleWorks 5.1, and if I could have done all this with
TimeOut Telecom, I wouldn't have used ProTERM. But, TimeOut Telecom doesn't
do VT100 nor Zmodem, and drops characters on the screen display at speeds
over 4800 baud, so ProTERM is da man, at least for me.

Actually, ProTERM 3.1 is a great piece of software, and I'd readily
recommend it. Version 3.1 adds the IIGS 57600 baud SCC serial driver and
some other improvements to 3.0. I think it sells for about $20 these days.

Learning some of those ProTERM macro commands, though, after years of
working with AppleWorks UltraMacros, though, was a real trip.

Hugh...




in article 
fba0cdd5-4b65-4663-aa61-77f9beea8ac8@m22g2000vbp.googlegroups.com, blakespot
at blakespot@gmail.com wrote on 12/11/08 6:07 AM:

> On Dec 10, 12:01�am, Hugh Hood <hughh...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Having read several recent posts and internet articles on connecting the
>> Apple II to a Unix machine, including, of course, to Macs running OS X, I
>> decided to give it a go.
> 
> It's fun stuff.  Perhaps mine is one of the articles you read.
> 
> http://www.bytecellar.com/archives/000113.php