Ok, my three regular readers may be asking themselves, “didn’t we just read this story?” They would be mistaken in thinking so, however. Back in late July I described the manner in which I configured my Apple //c to serve as a dumb terminal, tied via serial link to my Mac mini. In researching the project, I ran across a story of a user who had put an Apple Newton eMate 300 to similar duty on his Sun box. Being an eMate owner myself and having a vacant Mac-style serial port on my dual-port Keyspan USB-to-serial adapter, I felt I must get this going as well.
And today, I have. Have a look at the photos.
It’s hard to get as excited about this project as the Apple //c terminal since, well, I just did it with the Apple //c and I didn’t have to splice cables together and since – hey, let’s not fool ourselves – the eMate is a 25MHz ARM 710a (RISC)-based machine while the //c is powered by a mere 1.02MHz 65C02. But it’ still worth a post, I feel.
No, this won’t be a permanent office fixture. Just a little experiment. Sadly, the eMate will soon resume its typical roll as a paperweight to hold down my Apple Lisa 2 in the home “Byte Cellar.” Still – it made for a pretty interesting little exercise.
Nice to see an eMate in action! I just took mine out of the box it’s currently living in, just for olf time’s sake! I really love that thing, just don’t know what to do with it.
My eMate (actually, I have three of them) is my word processor of choice. The built-in word program is pretty close to perfect, the battery life is forever (once I rebuilt the ten-year-old battery back), and I get the most envious looks—and comments—in the coffee shop. My eMate and I are looking forward to a successful NaNoWriMo this year!
I spent a while trying to hook it up to my Intel iMac, until I finally just gave up and spent $50 on an old PowerBook 1400c to dock the eMate with. My vintage Apple collection is thus (1) powerful and (2) has a small footprint.
It’s good to see a Newton getting some use, even if only temporarily.
I actually love the MessagePad 300 as a portable serial terminal and have been tempted to pick one up to keep around the office. Recently I had to resort to using my MacBook Pro as a keyboard for my MessagePad 2100 during serial terminal duty, but that was probably a once-in-a-decade requirement:
http://makkintosshu.dyndns.org/journal/newton-serial-terminal-using-a-macbook-pro-as-a-keyboard
Looks nice. Good job.
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