Today I saw Bill Kendrick get his Atari 1200XL on Facebook.

"Posting via my Atari 1200XL (telneting to my Linux laptop, and running Links browser to visit FB mobile site). Did it work!?"



Honestly, if I had to connect up the Intellivision today, and I've been thinking about doing it again for fun BECAUSE I CAN , I would need to do much of what he did.

And I say "again" because in April of 2014 I was able to use an Intellivision, an Entertainment Computer System (ECS), a Cuttle Cart 3, a loopback adaptor (since the Cuttle Cart 3 serial port only has send/receive/ and ground), and InTVNut's Terminal program.

, and from there I would manage to get the Intellivision on IRC chat, and eventually telnet out to a shell account with a Lynx browser. From there with great difficulty I was able to log into Atariage and post the message:

"Looking at the first message from an Intellivision keyboard on Aatarige. Was hell getting here but where thres a whip theres a way. :)"

And if you wonder why my grammar was so bad, have you seen the ECS keyboard for one?



The keyboard is like a mock-up toy you would give a five year old. You know, the type you give them to think they are computing that they can bang on all day and you don't care. As you type on this keyboard the corner of the keys stick. And to add to that, you had to hit a key combination for return and backspace. I believe Control H and Control M come to mind.

And with a 20 x 12 screen (hey this game system is from 1978 what do you expect), the screen looked like this:



So you are guessing what you are typing. Don't get me wrong, the terminal kept up with 9600 baud quite well, did great at recognizing the text and color. Just didn't have the room to display it all. Oh and when I was on Atariage to post in that thread I had manually type in the URL of the message to find it. But I did it and I will probably never post a message on Atariage with my Intellivision and ECS ever again. Did it, managed to be the first in recorded history to do it, happy.

A year later I would when then the Electric Dreams BBS Podcast was released. I think going forward I might just call BBS's from time to time.

As for possibly getting on Atariage or Facebook again (though I said I probably never will): The shell account I called into in 2014 is no longer there. But if I were to access another computer in my house with a Lynx browser then I could use that to point to the interwebs.

Also my home line is now a digital line so the option of using the dialup modem is out. So will probably use a Lantronix with the Intellivision when I do. And then point that to my internal IP to the Linux server (been thinking it would be cool to get my Dreamcast up with Linux for that) and visit the internet. In all the Intellivision 20x12 glory. Hehe...