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Serial Device Server

P

paul.brett

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2007
Messages
376
Location
Wisbech, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, UK
Hi,

I want to have the option of connecting several of my vintage computers (such as my Tandy Model 100) to the Internet. Not all at the same time, but maybe in small groups.

What I am after is a Serial Device Server, so all I have to do is write applications (in BASIC) to get and put data from the serial ports of these computers.

Anybody got ones of these lying around? Long shot I know, but hey, I might get lucky.

Paul.
 
Why not simply get an ethernet adaptor that has AUI and a transceiver that converts to RJ45?

I got my IBM 51xx's and Amstrad PC1640 online that way :)
 
I was thinking an old Annex terminal server would be the thing to use.
I imagine folks would be giving them away at this point.
 
Annex, Livingston, Cisco made some in a 25xx series that are now cheap as beans, older Ascend (now Lucent) gear, Digi stuff, the afore-mentioned Lantronix gear, There's a ton of choices...sniff around fleaBay...


Tony
 
Would an Altos 986T do about the same job as a serial server like that one? I have one (need to check it out still) that has no use, yet. It would be neat if I could get it to do this job.

Nathan
 
NathanAllan said:
Would an Altos 986T do about the same job as a serial server like that one? I have one (need to check it out still) that has no use, yet. It would be neat if I could get it to do this job.

Nathan
Click to expand...

Yes. Or no...well, mebbe... If you have the right hardware & software installed. Do you have a multi-port I/O board installed? Do you have the correct drivers for it? Do you have a functional OS? It prolly wants Xenix, but the Altos installation disk format is proprietary, so a generic copy of DOS or Xenix can't be used, as they're in standard PC format. Then, of course, you'll need the installation key too. If the machine is already up & running though, these gotchas shouldn't be a problem.

--T
 
Serial Device Server

While waiting for the hardware I purchased, I decided to try a software solution to see if what I wanted to do was acheivable.

The software listens on port 8080 and connects up to COM1. So far so good. I wrote a web server on my Amstrad NC100, and got out from the little thing what I thought I needed, i.e. minimal HTTP headers and some HTML.

This does not work however, as the browser seems to be waiting for the connection to terminate before displaying anything.

Where a webserver would send the HTML and then close the connection, the serial to ethernet software is not aware that the 'transaction' has finished, and should close the client connection.

My question is this, is the hardware I have purchased going to suffer from the same problem? If yes, is there a sequence of bytes I can send to the browser to force disconnection? (I'm happy at this point to cater for popular browser(s) only).

A bit off topic I know, but here's hoping somebody can help.
 
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