A box with a flashing light zip-tied to a phone doesn't look dodgy at all in a coffee shop😁

12:19 - You really need to install the Black Night terminal emulator. It supports full color ANSI graphics, and I bet those BBS door scenes would look even more awesome.

Control-H, or whatever the Mac equivalent is, historically sent a backspace when the modem was command mode. I am very, very old.

This is so fascinating to me. I am older-I was in middle school in late eighties and I have no memory of these, lol. We spent 45 minutes typing in a code in middle school to watch a hot air balloon glide across the screen. I was struck by how much processing skill these kind of games require of kids-just the reading alone. These are the games all kids should start with even now. I’m a teacher and I can’t imagine my students playing these-it really requires so much imagination. It’s obvious when you look at things like these why there is so much creativity coming from this generation across the board. It’s like your mind is constructing the game instead of it already being made yup for you. I can imagine as a kid that you are seeing this all in your head as you were playing. Great video.

11:00 Old school terminal tricks: ctrl+H to backspace and ctrl+D to delete in a terminal. Also, ctrl+W erases the word preceding the cursor, and ctrl+U wipes out the current line. It's very old Unix standard that works even in modern terminals. If your keyboard has a real backspace key (actually says "backspace" or depicts it with a left pointing arrow), it will generally work fine in a terminal. But if the key says "delete" (I'm lookin' at you, Apple) then it sends an escape code in terminals with usually no visual result and you have to resort to the ctrl+ combo or remap the keys in the terminal and/or OS (I genuinely can't recall if the older software you're using has that remap capability). Ahh, the halcyon days of BBSing. They were a lot of fun. Except that it took over an hour to download a single floppy at 2400 baud! I never had a phone line clean enough for 56k, so 33.6k is the fastest I ever got to before broadband, and that still took ~5 minutes to download 1MB.

this channel is so underrated and deserves more subscribers, and your videos are fantastic as always, keep up the good work man!

Heads up, the (most likely) reason your first serial cable with gender changer didn't work is you need a null modem in the middle to swap around the tx and rx pairs

Nice. I've been building my own wifi modems inside old 56k modems

Man, I remember getting my first laptop, a second generation iBook with wifi (Airport) and OSX, after using PC's for several years, I was back in a new and much improved Mac world and truly living in the future. It was so awesome.

"You are now sober" Saddest part of this video

I have a Mac identical to yours, a 128K upgraded to a Plus and I fulfilled my dream of getting it online 6 months ago via a WiFi 232 serial modem. Still using it to this day! I watched your original video about wanting to play a MUD on your Mac before I even bought one and I felt the same way.

When you tried to plug the modem into the Mac's Serial port, I kind of expected 65scribe's "Sproinnng" sound effect to play.

I would love to see you go one step further on this with some of the slightly newer macs... actual "real internet" with ppp or slip

Quite a clever little device. I’ve got a few old machines I can use easily online now 👍

I have fell in love with this channel

man i love this. your my favorite retro channel!

Bloody brilliant. Great work!

Hacking, Whipping, and zip ties. Can always tell this is an Action Retro video! :)

Love the soldering montage sounds 👍

Now that is something I could only dream of as a kid. The first time I seen a wireless laptop it blew my mind. I have all kinds of projects involving wireless and dial up that I hope to make one day on another channel that will be tech focused. This stuff inspires to live out my childhood dreams. I had a longer comment but I spoke too soon, you ended up doing exactly what I was thinking and man it truly made me happy. THAT IS SO COOL MAN.

I absolutely love mine! I have two of them, and was able to do a zmodem bridge between two MS-DOS PCs with them... and also set up a Concurrent DOS terminal server over the internet using one of these! Great video!! As for me, I predominantly use Ethernet to get my old PCs online.

Wait. "Way back in the '90s"? LOL. Dude I love this Chan.

"I don't use my cellphone for anything else!" - hearty chuckle at that one, very good. :D

This is great! Very entertaining video. I need that thing to my old Compaq LTE's.

nice! Need to take my Tandy Model 200 into a coffee shop and connect to wifi with this device. Great Marchintosh content

And yes, I would like to see more Macintosh shenanigans, keep it up!

I really want to get an old DEC or Wyse terminal connected with one of these , but those are kinda hard to come by right now!! Awesome video as usual.

Oh yeah, dude. 8MHz machines will do things like that perfectly fine! I started my BBS days on a CoCo2 with a 300 baud modem. I used an 8088 8MHz machine for YEARS on BBSes. Today, I use Apple II series machines, 68k Macs (including a Plus with 4 megs, also!), etc. You should be great at 9600bps on those machines. I'm not sure what the maximum BPS rate is on the older Macs, but the comparable PCs were 9600 baud unless you had 16550 UARTs. 9600 is way more than adequate for these purposes though. Loved the video!

This video really brings back sweet memories! My first computer was a Mac SE in 1989 (just one tiny step up from the Mac Plus upgrade you demoed.) I had mine decked out with 4MB RAM, a 20MB internal hard drive, 2400baud Hayes compatible modem, and the latest copy of Zterm. Yep, screen scrolling was a bit laggy, but completely usable. I spent four years of college dialing into the local university "VAX Cluster," where I would check email and telnet to MUDs, BBSes, and IRC, as well as use gopher and public ftp archives to find and download all of the latest freeware and shareware for my Mac. I love that these old machines can still connect to the internet, and that there are still fun retro destinations on the internet. My favorite is ISCABBS; just telnet to bbs.iscabbs.com. ISCABBS is a telnet accessible BBS that has been in operation since 1989. It is the oldest (as far as I know) continuously operating free online community on the internet. With nearly 1,000 active users and public forums, sometimes you'll see nearly 30 people logged in at the same time! ISCABBS also contains private forums, internal mail, and instant messaging. ISCABBS would make a great place to connect to if you do more demos, especially if you want to show interaction with other users via chat. It's viewable in ANSI color as well as black and white. Thanks again for this and other videos. I'm grinning ear to ear remembering all the fun times online with my old Mac. :)

What an awesome video. The BBS days were so awesome, thanks for showing how much fun this is. I have a WiModem 232 for old computers like Amiga and Apple IIGS. Most of my PPC Macs have built in Ethernet so it is easy to still use those. However, you don't get the cool retro feeling of using the Hayes command set with ethernet.

you deserve way more subs

He made it look way more suspicious by zip tying all those cables to his phone.

This brings back memories of dialing in to the local BBS on my Apple II plus that I still have.

Yay MUDs! glad to see them get some love. I used to play on muds in high-school. :D "Moooom quick picking up the phone!"

I wonder if the firmware on that device could be expanded to "emulate" PPP or SLIP, so you can get online.

Awesome! Thanks.

Thanks for this video! I’ve purchased parts to make something similar with a PiZero, but now I ordered this instead.

cool build

This is so fascinating as someone who never got to experience any of this when it was new. I'm only 25 and my first memories of the internet probably date back to around 2005. I've been fascinated by retro tech for as long as I can remember. I'd love to own more retro devices but I haven't gotten super lucky with finds yet and ebay can be quite expensive.

Neat! That could be useful for a retro computer but with Wi-Fi. Long live to the macs!!

I never dialed into a BBS in the late 90s, but I did figure out I could dial into my local library, where besides the usual library things like letting you search the catalog, let you access the internet with lynx. It was a great backup for when my AOL minutes were used up.

Nice DIY stand!

how about using ADB (or on PC: the PS/2 / DIN) Port to power the WiFi Modem?

Neat device. Just ordered one after watching your video. I recently built an IDEFile for a Lisa and found that the pin outs for serial did not align with a normal IDC ribbon cable connector. I had to wire up my own cable too.

Nice! For OSX macs there also exists a custom driver for android usb tethering

Amazing. I was thrilled just to plug a USB ball mouse into my phone the other day. ;D

Awesome video, I haven't tried to play any terminal games using my modem, I'll have to check it out!

You have taken on a project that I am looking to do myself. I also played a lot of muds and still have a few I play now. I just got a Powerbook 180c up and booting. Next is doing this modem work and away I go.

I just bought an XP-era HP Pavilion laptop. My plan is to install FreeDos on it for a retro distraction-free writing environment. But, I definitely want to get one of these and do the BBS thing in my free time.

Thats A Realy Cool Emulator Yes Your 128k Mac Brings Back A lot Of Memories I Bought That Very Same 128 Mac Back In 1984 New In Cupertino Ca Sterlings Computer Store For $2600 That Also Included The Image Writer Printer A lot Of Money Back In 1984 And Have Been A Loyal Apple User Great Video Sean

You could paint the box a dark grey or even better, an excellent beige .

I like hardware hacks like this, providing modern solutions to vintage tech. Need a replacement hard drive? SCSI2SD or a CF2IDE adapter. Floppy drive dead? FloppyEMU for Macs, GOTEK's for basically everything else. Retrotink for getting old-school game consoles connected to modern TV's.

You might be able to a) use a battery bank that is small and compact for coffee shops or b) a small mod to add a Lithium battery pack on the power connections of the device. Though a small battery pack would be cheaper and EZ to use.

Well, I know what my next little project is going to be. You can actually make your own Wifi modem if you want. There are instructions online. You can even buy 8pin mini-DIN plugs for the Apple end of the cable, although they’re not fun to solder. Nice work 👍

That zip-tie job is a piece of art! Not sure whether it helps with looking any less suspicious though. ;) I managed to get my Powerbook 170 "online" 15 years ago, by configuring internet connection sharing on Windows XP and having the Powerbook dial into the PC via PPP. It was a pain to get everything set up, but at least I managed to get it to work briefly loaded google.com on ancient versions of the Wannabe and iCab browsers. As far as I remember, I didn't get the PPP working on my Mac Plus. That modem bridge sure sounds ten times better than that mess!

Greetings from Argentina 🇦🇷🇦🇷🇺🇸🇺🇸💾

Neat antenna solution. Very steampunk.

For computers with a built in RJ11 modem I have an RPI set up running dreampi to connect to the internet. But for my older stuff I really ought to get something like this.

That old 540c has a beautiful screen

I'd like to see something like this for PowerPC Macs from 1998-2006 whereby you could have an 802.11N slot into the AirPort Extreme or Original Port.

This reminds me a bit of the "Mobile Desktop" prank by Improv Everywhere, where they took old desktop computers into Starbucks. Nice video, I didn't know MUDs were still around.

Good vid, I found one called WiFi64 on Github, it was basically the same thing as yours, running on an esp-01, but intended for a Commodore 64 (which I don't have) I connected it to a TTL to RS232 converter pcb, and put the whole thing in an old translucent modem case. This I use on my old TRS-80 model 1. Good fun. I'll have to try some of those sites you mentioned. I've been looking for a way to use one of these WiFi modems to connect to a NAS so I can save all my old TRS software where a modern PC can access and share it.

Can you still get PCMCIA wifi cards? But it seems PowerBook didn't have expansion slots until the 500s and the 1400?

I remember connecting to a VAX system through a 300 baud modem, then later a 1200 baud one. Painful, just for text! It wasn't until I got a 9600 bps connection that the text scrolled by at a rate faster than I could read it. MUDs weren't much fun before this! :)

Have you tried SSHing into anything from that setup? We're close to the same age, but the BBS/MUD stuff is not something I messed with back in the day. Still cool stuff!

What Mac would you say is the oldest that you could still get to load a website page in a browser with this wifi device? Powerbook G3? Or older? Nice video btw. Love retro Macs!

I've still got a Phone Modem with the cups to put the handset into. I used to love dialing into BBS systems. I had massive phone bills back then. I don't miss long distance charges. I wonder if FidoNet is still running?

I have an old multiple scan monitor but I am having a hard time finding an apple Female DB 15 to male vga cable. Would you know where to get one?

Did you tone out the Apple adapter? It's possible that one or the other is a null modem cable, which while identical in appearance has a different pinout than a serial cable. Also, if you want to get an even easier CF solution, you could use a PC Card to CF adapter.

Man does he love his powerbooks

I wanna do this, I have the same chipset esp 8266 with the at commands flashed to it. My problem is the serial rs232 setup.. I get nothing from at

Anazing to think your channel popped up a year ago!

I've been dinking around with electronics for decades and sending serial commands to modems since using 2G/3G and today I finally learned that AT = Attention 😳

4:49 did you build the RS422 to RS422 cable or the RS422 to RS232 adapter in the pinout guide?

Hey - I love your 1400c! I have a g3 upgraded 1400c but the screen is terrible. Do you have any suggestions on how I can fix the screen? (Pretty sure it is a bad backlight).

I used a PB 165 through much of college. Wish I still had it. Not to use, but just to have around.

I wonder if you could pump the output into a screen reader and play it without any eyeballs?

Apple Mac to ImageWriter I cable with DB-25 to DB-9 converter is what I use on my Mac SE/30

Any way to get PPP running and browse TheOldNet or download from Macintosh Gardens?

Could this be used with a Macintosh plus so I can browse your 68k news website?

how did you configure zterm to connect at 9600? When I change connection speed to 9600 it was not responding. I could only make connection at 300..

I spent a lot of time with a MacPlus and a metal 2400bps modem playing TW2002 and LORD.

Would this work on a Powerbook 140?

1 annoyed guy from Starbucks downvoted this video :D

Just picked up a gateway 2100 solo locally and im curious about this kinda connectivity.

Please, are there any other Web browsers for these ancient machines other than Classilla? TYVMIA.

Could this work with Apple II family computers also ? Or only with macs ?

I just got a Macintosh classic before watching this video

Is there a way to mount this internally? It looks like a hacker's tool on the outside of the casing.

I'd love to see some web browsers working with it!

I have my XT online with a proper ISA ethernet card. But it's way too slow and constantly times out even on a BBS. Something like this to handle the connection itself would be far more stable. (Except that my serial ports on my XT don't work)

Could you use PPP with this modem? Are TCP and PPP implementations available for any system 7 version? System 6? I seem to have forgotten most of what I know about System 7 internet access :( ... I guess the modem itself would have to implement the ppp server, or forward to a relay on the internet that did.

How do I get a working battery for a PowerBook 165 in 2021?

do you still sell this unit? and cable? thanks

HE HAS THE REAL MINI GENDER CHANGER OMG

Wait, i'm not a retro tech person... At 4:07 the port on the left doesn't support the card? Correct me if i'm wrong

I wonder if you could actually connect it to Starbuck's WiFi. They usually have a "captive portal" and you usually need to click a button after connecting for it to work.

Does it work with proper web browsers?

I wonder if it'd work on a TRS Mod 100...

Can this wifimodem dial to another machine to play doom?