You may be wondering why the hell you'd want to do such a thing like run a Mac as a serial terminal. Three reasons:

• To use an older Mac (e.g. a Mac Plus) as a fully-functional serial console. Save money on dumb terminals! Recycle that old kit!

• To use a newer Mac (especially a laptop) as a temporary serial console when working (for example) at a customer site.

• You really liked the clickety-clacky keyboards on the Mac Plus and it'd be a shame to waste it...

• That you know what you are connecting your Mac to and what kind of connection it needs.
• That you have the right cables.
• That you can perform the oh-so technical task of copying files to a floppy disk!
• That the device you are connecting to will accept serial connections.
• That the moon is not made out of swiss cheese.

• Classic OS (e.g. Mac OS 6.x - 8.x without USB)
• Mac OS X / Mac OS 9.x (With USB)
• Download the software

Hardware

25D Male <---> Mac serial (mini - DIN)
9D Female <---> 25D Female null-modem cable

In this setup, the Mac serial cable was originally used to connect a modem to the Mac. Combined with a regular null-modem cable, it can be used to connect to another machine.

Software

Bootable Serial Console Disk 800k

By using this disk, you can turn a machine even as old as a 1MB Mac Plus into a serial console. The disk is distributed as a .sit.hqx and consists of the following:

• ZTerm 0.9
• Skeleton Mac OS 6.0.3
To use this disk, simply copy the contents of the unstuffed folder to a floppy disk, bearing in mind that the Mac Plus can only read 800K (Double Density) disks. See the README file in the unstuffed archive for more information.

A copy of the original ZTerm 0.9 distriution can be found under downloads, together with the disk archive. ZTerm 0.9 is only used here as it is reasonably compact and will fit onto an 800K floppy disk.

In Use


The contents of the bootable 800k floppy

ZTerm running on the Mac Plus

Pine under ZTerm running on the Mac Plus

Drivers for both OS X and OS 9.x can be found at http://www.keyspan.com/downloads/

Hardware

Keyspan USB <---> 9D Male Serial adaptor
9D Female <---> 9D Female null-modem cable

As with the Classic OS setup, these cables are connected back to back to allow a null-modem connection to be made to the remote machine.

Software

ZTerm 1.1beta6 is an excellent communications program, available for both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. It is available from: http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/

• SerialConsoleDisk.sit.hqx
• ZTerm0.9.sit