Apple Newton eMate 300 is an excellent terminal!
The other day I picked up two Apple eMates 300… I needed those for some other project, of which you’ll hear about soon. :D I still have them laying around and I wanted to do some work on some of the Sun-machinery I have here (and probably more on it’s way, but more on that later too)...
Anyways, none of my Suns have a graphics card and I tend to like it that way. But my favourite (and only) serial terminal I used for connecting to Suns (and other gear), a Mac Classic II is acting up(I have to wait 2 hours+ before it boots) and totally unusable if I want to do something quick. So tonight I figured out how to use one of my Newtons for just that and it’s pretty excellent! (imho) weeee!
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And the only thing I had to do was setting some variables (using ‘printenv’ and ‘setenv’) and then type ‘boot’ ...
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Next thing I’m gonna use this Newton for is a complete OpenBSD-installation on one of the other Suns… weeee!
My Apple Newton eMate must be the hippest serial terminal on the block! (and the only one too… considering the people in my neighbourhood…)
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Is it possible to stick a wifi pc card in emate and listen to streaming mp3?
I’ve heard of people using newtons to do this
Well, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna need a Newton MessagePad 2000/2100 for that. Those models feature a 162 MHz StrongARM CPU while the rest of the family (including mine) comes with a 20/25 MHz CPU. All models (afaik) feature a PCMCIA-slot for an additional WiFi-card
talking about installing OpenBSD on your Suns… the dual-bridge is a cool thing, but don’t you think an Ultra-2 is a total waste for this kind of job? I mean… 2×200MHz, 512MB, SCSI-drives… it’s not exactly fast by today’s standards, but I think the U2 can do more than just swap some ethernet frames around. Hey, this thing will run Solaris 10 with Solaris Zones and ZFS (well, at least technically, I’m not sure about the license thing at the moment). For example, you could set up zones for Apache, Azureus and IRSSI, and while Apache gets 0wn3d and Azureus crashes, IRSSI will keep on running. Just a thought…
Ha, you’re absolutely right! I decided this dual-bridge setup can run on an Ultra 1 as well… So at this moment I trimmed down the hardware and my router is a 143MHz U1 with 64MB and the dual bridge is the same but then with 128MB… Both OpenBSD (which doesn’t support SMP on sparc64 yet). BTW, I suppose you like Sun hardware, just like me… Check back here coming friday (somewhere in the afternoon) and you’ll be astonished, I guess (*^_^*)
Yes, I do like Sun hardware. I’ve got a complete Ultra-1 system, but due to lack of space in my tiny appartment it’s stored at my parents’ house at the moment, and for the same reason I’m resisting the urge to buy a more powerful one like an U60 which nowadays isn’t too expensive even on eBay.
Well, even the big ones like E450 and upwards are affordable, but I guess we can read more about this on friday afternoon :-)
haha, well, I’m not sure if it’s going to be an E450… it’s very vague… but it sounded interesting enough to go out and pick it up… we’ll see tomorrow :D
hi.. i have this emate 300 .. works great.. use it to write whilst out and about.. problem is.. I’m pretty computer illiterate and don’t know if and how to connect it to my g4 ibook.. so i can transfer my text etc.. is there an easy and cheap way of doing it.. thanks.. lee
Can’t you just save text files to a memory can and then use a card reader on the ibook? I’m getting a emate 300 in the post to play with soon.
I have an emate 300 using the 2.1 os. I downloaded newton connection utilites and was able to load Quickfigure spreadsheet program fine, also an Excel add on to it, but it does not find any other packages I try to load (from both sides of apple talk connection through serial cable. Trying to figure it out. downloading files from internet on osx. Any idea what’s wrong? Install package button, try to find file, is invisable.
Instructions, please.
Hi. I’m completely new to Newton! I am searching for information on SSH’ing from a Newton 2100 into OS X (I use SSH regularly and with port forwarding between boxes) but I have no idea whether this can be achieved on a Newton.
Your post, using the eMate as a terminal head is the nearest thing I have stumbled across. Please would you elaborate on how you’ve managed to use the eMate as a terminal and also, if you have any information on SSH from a Newton 2100, I’d be most grateful for it.
Thanks – John