I was feeling nostalgic tonight, so I went out to the loft in the shop
and dug around and found an old TI Silent 700 portable terminal that I
picked up somewhere along the way.
It needed a little bit of work...the paper-advance stepper had seized
up, but a little TLC there got it happy again, and the solenoid that
pulls the thermal printhead away from the paper when the paper advances
was way out of adjustment. After tinkering with it for a while, I
powered it up, and it seems to work great.
The machine is a "Model 745 Portable" with built-in acoustic coupler
cups at the rear of the machine. It works at 300 or 110 baud.
I actually dug out an old Western Electric phone (most of the new
telephones today have handsets that won't fit into an acoustic coupler
cup) and dialed up my Sun Unix system (which has a couple of 28.8 modems
hanging off it), and stuffed the phone handset into the cups, and viola...
a (upper case only) LOGIN: prompt! Heck, there was even a termcap for it!
The terminal works great...I loaded up the PDP-11 simulator, and loaded
the image for RT-11, and played around for a while. It brought back
some memories, no doubt! The acoustic coupler worked fantastic...no
glitches, except when the dog barked at a noise outside...and I got a few
_at_'s printed.
The first question for y'all is this: On the rear panel of the machine is
a DB-15 male connector...my assumption this is for hooking up a (RS232 or
current-loop) 'direct connection' to the terminal. I don't have any
documentation
for the machine, and am wondering if anyone out there might know the pinout
for this connector.
The next question is: Anyone know where I could find the thermal paper for
this
thing? I've got a good sized roll of it in the machine, and a spare roll
still
in the wrapper, but my guess is that as time goes on, it's only going to
become
more and more difficult to find. Anyone know if thermal FAX machine paper
in
roll form would work?
Happy retrocomputing,
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculators Web Pages
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7510
Received on Thu Feb 25 1999 - 00:24:04 GMT