Today's letter comes from New York, where Keith writes:

Hi, I purchased a tandy 102 at a rummage sale yesterday. I have a ibook and a imac. I was wondering if you have been able to make your 102 talk with osX? I do have a cable that has a hook up that has a modem end that fits into the 102 and a regular phone line on the other end.
Thanks, Keith

I haven't had my Tandy out for a couple of years, ever since I switched to my Newton and my iBook as my primary travel companions. But the name of the game here is "Serial".

Hardware

1) You'll need to get a "usb to serial" adapter. They come in a number of flavors, depending on where you want to go with this. The most straight forward would be to to get a "USB to RS-232" serial port adapter like the one that Keyspan sells:

www.keyspan.com/products/usb/pdaadapter/

Then you would just need a serial cable that will fit into the USB adapter on one end and the T102 on the other.

2) A small variation would be to get a "USB to RS-422 miniDin8" adapter. (I'm noting this simply because I already have one.)

www.keyspan.com/products/usb/USA28x/

Then you'll need to get an "ImageWriter I Cable" which has a standard RS-232 port at one end and an RS-422 on the other.

Software

So once you've got either:

Mac -> USB-to-RS-232 adapter -> Serial cable -> Tandy
or
Mac -> USB-to-RS-422 adapter -> ImageWriter I cable -> Tandy

you've got the hardware ready to go. Now you should use a term program like zTerm (although in OS X you might be able to get Terminal to do this. Try typing "man tip") to get a data connection between the two. Check out more info at:

www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/fetish/m102/howto.shtml

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