Hacker News Reader

Comment by tssva | Hacker News Reader

Minicom which is available for most posix systems including Linux and macOS is modeled on Telix.

My personal favorite DOS terminal program was Commo. It was totally customizable using macros. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commo

View on HN

I used the heck out of Minicom when I finally made Linux my "daily driver" back in the early 90s.

When I finally did get dialup Internet service I ended up using "dip"[1] to script the logon to the ISP's terminal server (a Xyplex, if I remember correctly). I remember that the terminal server answered for finger and showed you the usernames of the logged-on users, their logon and idle time, and their serial port numbers. I remember complaining to the ISP when I was getting busy signals dialing into the modem pool and, when I finally did get on, seeing users logged-on two or three times with multi-hour idle times.

[1] http://ibiblio.org/gferg/ldp/man/man8/dip.8.html

The good old days.. I remember using dip! I helped to build a few ISPs. We used Xylogic Annex terminal servers at one place. The second ISP used USR digital modems (I forget what they were called?) By the time I set up the third one, we'd outsourced all dialup to a third party network.

I knew a guy who ran a small ISP in the Dayton, OH area. He went from having banks of external modems on POTS lines connected to multi-port serial cards attached to a Windows NT Server 3.51 machine to an Ascend router with a PRI and "digital modems" (CODECs in DSPs, no doubt) to finally using an outsourced dial provider, all in the space of about 18 - 24 months. I wish I'd been a little older and a little more business savvy at the time. It was clearly a wild time, and was probably lots of fun.

I remember working in the "server room" of one of the early ISPs. There were about 100 individual phone lines coming off the wall, each going into a modem. It was like a river of phone cable. Each modem also had its own serial cable and power brick, too, of course. The bricks were pretty large, so there were power strips chained 3 layers deep. It felt about 100 degrees in there (no AC or cooling of any kind.) Thinking about it now, I'm surprised the whole place didn't melt down.

I used to deploy Xylogics Annex terminal servers in hospitals to connect bar code scanners via LAT to DEC Alpha servers running OpenVMS. I never deployed them for dialup access but I did deploy Shiva LanRover devices to a few ISPs and enterprise customers for dialup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com