How do I Connect a 30yr-old Tandy 1400LT laptop to the internet?
Well, if you're really feeling old-school, you can go back to a prehistory I'm barely old enough to remember!
You will need:
- A copy of DOS to run on the Tandy
- Kermit (the terminal emulator, not the frog)
- A null modem cable (or for some real old-school cred, a couple of dial-up modems & phone lines)
- A machine running some kind of Unix-like OS, connected to the internet, with a serial port.
Configure the Unix machine's getty or eqiuvalent so you can log in on the serial console.
Connect the Tandy to the Unix machine's serial port.
Either using the null modem cable or via the two modems and the telephone network.
Fire up the terminal emulator.
Dial the modem if required.
Log in to the Unix box.
Use links (or lynx), ftp, PINE, or any other favorite text-mode internet software.
For best results watch this while setting it all up.
The OS should be no problem as it is a 386 hardware.
You'll probably need 4MB of RAM (likely higher) at an absolute minimum to run Linux, and likely 16MB to run any distribution or kernel with a decent software selection since 2000 or so. If you can't upgrade the RAM you are stuck.
Some brief searches seem to suggest this has an 8088 with 512KB or 768KB or RAM, though. Modern Linux won't run on that at all. (You may want to keep an eye on ELKS, the Tandy's NEC CPU is mentioned in the boot/setup.S file.)
I did get Linux booted on an old 1995-era "Winbook" laptop via floppy, I believe I used muLinux.
rs-232c connector
The way to "convert" serial to a network connection is PPP. You would need to set up a PPP client on your laptop, and have a pppd running on another Linux/Windows host that can route your ppp connection to your outgoing Internet connection.
You can probably still use it as an ssh terminal somehow if you install SSHDOS on it.
If anything, put an RS-232 adapter on your Linux system, configure your inittab to spawn a getty on ttyS0 or ttyUSB0 and use a DOS terminal program to access your system.
I have a 1400HD and oddly enough do connect it to the internets.
The best method is to get a Xircom PE3-10BT ethernet adapter which will connect to the 1400's parallel port. The PE3 has a DOS ODI driver which will let you use a TCP stack like mTCP, WATTCP, PC/TCP, etc. mTCP includes a irc, ftp, telnet and other clients and works well.
Next would be to connect a Digi One SP or linux box running tcpser to the 1400's serial port and use it as a virtual modem. Either will emulate a modem connected to com1 letting you use a normal terminal software such as procomm, telix, qmpro on the 1400 to telnet.