Friends, my 2100 odyssey has brought me to the promised land.
Last night, it all came together. My dongle adapter arrived via happy UPS
guy. Teased me about my obvious delight, asking what the heck could be so
important in such a little box. Unnerved, I dashed into the secret
laboratory hidden cleverly as the basement in my tiny house. About an hour
and a half before the kids got home from school, I was clearly going to hav=
e
me a Newton Web server, which is what got me started on this whole thing.
After tripping over Grants web page one day, I vowed I would get the newton
I had been thinking about buying on and off for about a year now.
With some money from a big job I just finished, I bought a newton 2100 from
J and K Sales on November 11th. Amazingly clear screen, decent battery life
(I was scared it was going to be a dud, but it really lasts quite a while).
The Newton came with the battery, an ac adapter, original stylus, and all
the covers. The screen is cherry, untouched by human hands. (They sell them
accourdingly). I Proceeded to ebay and bought a brand new newton keyboard, =
a
serial cable, a 2100 dongle, and a Lucent Silver Orinoco card. (Used buy it
now for the wireless card, paid $49.99)
All was in readiness.
I then began to read up on Newtonerati whenever I had a free moment. The
state of the newton web community is still going strong. I jumped into the
list, asked some questions at an unfortunately noisy time, and got not a lo=
t
of feedback, but I did hear from Grant and a few other pleasant people
offering help and info. I was concerned, only because real newbie info, the
kind of help I needed, real hand holding, like "I just got a newton, and it
doesn=B9t come with a manual, what the hell is this routing button they keep
saying I need to push?" kind of questions were holding me back.
I read the FAQ, like a good little doobie* (*theres a Zappa reference if
anyone is watching) But a tremendous amount of pages were missing from the
internet. Stuff that looked like people were moving on, web sites gone,
resources lost. I used the internet archive to read up on pages that were
cataloged back in 91 but offline now. Stuff like that. The main difficulty
was just finding the info I needed to tell me the basics. Its frustrating,
only because its the kind of thing tech support with a friend is good for,
and mailing lists and google searches are good but not great for. By this I
mean, if you ask a buddy to show you a 5 minute demo on the newton, and hel=
p
you get up to speed, asking relevant questions, showing you the mysteries o=
f
the holy routing button with the magical words "its that one there that
looks just like an envelope" bang. You're in. Saves you sooo much time. But
I suppose it detracts from those stories you get to tell the kids when they
need help with their laptops or whatever that start with, "Why in my day...=
"
So anyway, I found the drivers I needed from unna and from the nhttpd site.
Google searches of web blogs and "how-to" and help message board posts
filled in the details of missing newton extensions I should also throw in.
Having 2 G3 towers running OS 9, my titanium powerbook, my G4, an airport
base station and a cable modem all set up and at my beck and call helped.
Being a freelancer now with some free time before my wedding this Friday
helped too. So I got the serial cable and dongle to work with the G3,
installed the drivers for the lucent, configured internet access 10 or 11
times, fiddled and diddled with it, updated my base stations settings to
route http port 80 to the static IP of the newton, and I was surfing with
newtscape, emailing with eudora, and serving up hot web pages of my crusty
old lovable green buddy. Note to new users like me: don=B9t shell out $20
bucks on a "newton serial connection cable" if you are also like me and hav=
e
8 crates of cables full of every conceivable macintosh cable including the
LOCALTALK CONNECTION CABLES which is exactly what it is. So now I was
wireless, and promptly had no need for the cable or dongle. How sad, in a
way. They are both on ebay for $49 for the pair, btw.* ;-)
I am just in awe of it all. I was briefly on the mymac.net tracker. But thi=
s
episode taught me the joys of how to reset my newton. (you learn these
things only as you need them it seems). I cant figure out why I cant access
my newton from the net, but locally I can get pages np. My airport's port
forwarding seems fine, but my ISP could be blocking port 80. I timbuktu-ed
into a clients server I take care of, and brought the page up from my newto=
n
fine. But my friend in NYC couldn=B9t see it. I did get a lot of flakiness, I
forgot to install the NPDS watcher, which I thought might help. I installed
the latest versions of all the modules, and noticed that resetting it often
when it seemed to be screwy fixed things. I am not sure whats up, but I am
confident after things calm down around here I will fix it. I'll be thinkin=
g
about the DNS thing over dinner with strangers on the cruise ship, Im sure.
Now if I could think of a way to sneak it into my luggage without Julie
seeing it....
Thanks everyone.=20
The camaraderie, the incredible amount of know how, and the generosity
definitely make me glad to be here
DVS
-- www.twomacguys.com''' c-OO \ - =20 =83
* the cables are not for sale on ebay. They are in my secret lab that is disguised as the basement.
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Dec 02 2002 - 22:03:34 EST