[Coco] Using a pee sea as a "server" for internet access?

[Joel Ewy]

Leon Howell wrote:
> I have heard that a lot of people connect their CoCo to the internet by 
> connecting it to a pee sea. The pee sea does the hard part but you're actualy 
> using the CoCo. It's like using a shell account but you own the whole mess.
>
> How do I do this? I have Supercomm, Osterm, Jterm, Telecomm, and an ibm 
> thinkpad with windows '95 and internet explorer 2.0, but I can download a 
> different browser or other program if I need to, and I hate that %$&@ task 
> bar/start button junk so I will probably switch to an older version of windows 
> ( probably 3.0) if I can get the MWave drivers.
>
>   
I don't think that any version of MS-Windows is likely to be very
helpful for this particular task without the addition of some extra
software, which may not even exist for Windows.  MS-Windows expects its
terminal to be the PC's keyboard and video display, and while there are
lots of Windows-based programs to make your PC act like a terminal for
another computer, Windows has precious little facility for putting its
display up on a text terminal in a way that would be acceptable.  I have
vague memories of some kind of program that allowed you to run DOS from
a remote terminal, but that was a long time ago.  Maybe Cygwin could
come to the rescue?

But since UNIX was born into a world of text terminals and teletypes, a
UNIX-like operating system is probably your best bet here.  Fortunately,
there are a number of Live CD options available if you want to preserve
MS-Windows on your hard drive.

I've used DSL (Damn Small Linux) on a lot of older systems.  But I've
never tried to use it with an external terminal, so I don't know what
kind of getty support it has (getty is the program that hangs around
watching a serial line for a terminal (or TeleTYpe) to log in).  You
might also try something like Dyne: Bolic or some Knoppix variant.  I'm
not sure what the specs of your computer are, but I am sure that others
on this list can chime in with their favorite Live CD distro.  I'm also
sure that somebody who just doesn't get it will pipe up and tell you to
run out and get a new computer so you can install a full-blown,
cutting-edge Linux distro to the tune of about 6-8GB HD, 1.5GHz CPU, and
512M RAM, just so you can browse the Web in a VT100 emulator on your
CoCo.  :)

Once you can log in with your terminal emulator and get a shell, you can
browse the Web with lynx, links, or elinks, and you can telnet, FTP,
ssh, or whatever else you like.  You can use rz/sz to copy files to and
from your CoCo.
> Someday I will try to write a web browser for OS-9 & Multi Vue, but first I 
> need to get online, and I would prefer to use the CoCo, even if I have to 
> stick a pee sea in between.
>
>   
If you get a Web browser running on the CoCo, you will be a CoCo hero. 
I have been thinking about making some attempt to port elinks to the
MM/1.  One thought I've had is to cook up a little proxy that would run
on another machine, which would grab an image off the Web, scale it way
down, quantize it down to 16 colors, and then send it to the CoCo for
display.  Right-click (if you have the two-button mouse) or shift-click
on the image and you can download the original.

I think that a sensible thing to do in OS-9 would be to first write a
'wget' utility which would run as a separate process and retrieve a file
via HTTP.  Since the CoCo has no proper TCP/IP stack, the first versions
of 'wget' could include as much of that as necessary, or could even
start by ordering a slave PC to 'wget' something for it and send it to
the CoCo via zmodem, or some similar protocol.  Other versions could use
the Superboard's ethernet, or a Siteplayer Telnet module, or whatever.

Then write a simple HTML renderer.  Make it ignore most of the
complicated tags at first.  Just get the basic formatting right and put
the text up on the screen.  Then it could be made to call 'view' to
display pictures, either pre-processed into something CoCo-friendly by a
utility running on a faster computer, or (for GIFs) using view's (rather
slow) GIF rendering capability, depending on a menu selection.

Written in the right way, a little web browser could provide a simple,
mostly text-based display as a stand-alone program, and could optionally
interface to tools running on more powerful computers to improve the
display.  There might even be an option to remote control a different
machine to use a full-featured browser to render a page, capture a
screen shot, and then send it to the CoCo for display.  So you could
browse around in text mode until you see a page that you want to get a
better view of, then hit a button or select a menu item, and a helper
app running on a PC will send you a picture of what the page looks like
in all its graphics-intensive glory.  Just a few thoughts.

JCE
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