Date   : Thu, 16 Mar 2006 12:51:57 +0000
From   : Rob <robert@...>
Subject: Re: 6502s and SASI/SCSI.

At 10:55 16/03/2006, Jules Richardson wrote:

>gARetH baBB wrote:
>>The plan I have, once I get stuff off evil evil Watfraud DDFS 
>>discs, is to put Musictel 2 back up ... on a real BBC ...
>>Attached to a Pace Nightingale with AA board ...
>>Wired to another Pace Nightingale ...
>>Attached to a serial port on a Linux box and the use the Java 
>>client to connect to that ...
>
>I'm almost sure you'll need something to simulate a PSTN inbetween 
>those modems, unless they're clever enough to just 'know' they're 
>connected back to back...

Nightingales are about as dumb as you can get.. you may get away with 
as little as a 9V battery across the line connecting them together..


>Unless of course you have a have a small home exchange and don't mention it...

It's pretty cheap to find old small PABX's. There's an minimaster 3 
on eBay at the moment for a tenner, for instance - I used to have one 
of these at home; pure pulse-dial POTS only!  Very definitely in 
keeping and extremely suitable for doing this sort of thing with, as 
you just hang modems on the extension lines and dial between 
them.  (and I did!)



>(it's something I want to futz around with at the museum sometime 
>too - I'd quite like to recreate the whole acoustic coupler 
>experience for people :-)
>
>Plus of course getting some sort of entire viewdata system 'online' 
>using vintage hardware would be rather cool... (I'm not sure if any 
>server-side software still exists, though)

Micronet used to have a pdp-11 at Herbal Hill for doing the offline 
editing on.  I really wish I could remember what the software was 
called, but of course I only ever saw the viewdata side of it, (Apart 
from when doing the backups, but that wasn't exactly a get-to-know-it 
experience!)  Having said that, it wasn't a pure "Prestel" experience 
- you actually got closer to that from CommunITel or the Gnome 
software. (Running on Beebs, of course!)

I wonder what happened to that machine - did it move up to {where did 
they go?} with them when EMAP sold out, and they all moved in with 
Prestel, or was it scraped?  They were in the middle of changing to a 
new server for the editing when I left them, beforehand, but that was 
not going well..

Rob