Date   : Sat, 18 Mar 2006 21:53:30 +0000
From   : Thomas Wright <thomas.wright1@...>
Subject: Re: 6502s and SASI/SCSI.

Rob wrote:
> 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!)
>
>
You could also use a null modem cable and use something like BBS Server 
http://telbbs.petscii.com/ - which although appears for the C64 should 
actually work with any 8bit micro as the software runs on a PC.  Then 
you need comms software on the BBC of course.

The server acts as a virtual modem so no PBX required as it routes 
everything via telnet to a telnet bbs (which is alot of em like 
http://www.synchro.net/ ) - or another copy of BBS server to convert it 
back to access bbs software on a genuine null modem connected 8 bit machine.
>
>> (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
>
>
>
So any one know where i can buy a null modem cable for a BBC master ? 
:-) Not much use with a soldering iron!  Any recommendations for  comms 
software for the master?

regards

Tom