KG7PFS Posted February 4, 2021 Share Posted February 4, 2021 I accidentally found this picture on google. What is it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted February 4, 2021 Share Posted February 4, 2021 Took some digging, but it's an AppleLine Protocol Converter. Looks like it's a device that allowed you to use an (older) Macintosh as a terminal for IBM mainframes: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1002/retro-scan-of-the-week-appleline Here's a manual: https://manualzz.com/doc/7082315/apple-comp-ter-apple-cluster-controller-and-appleline I imagine this is quite rare, as you might expect for an oddball peripheral like this released back in 1985. I'd never even heard of this before! According to a comment at the first link, this sucker cost $2,000! It's also much larger than it looks in the above photo. Here's a photo I found on Facebook that shows it sitting next to a Macintosh computer: ..Al 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempest Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 Neat! I wish my SCSI enclosure I use with my IIe looked like that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluejay Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 Interesting. Do IBM terminals have some proprietary protocol or is it standard RS232? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
desiv Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 (edited) 8 minutes ago, bluejay said: Interesting. Do IBM terminals have some proprietary protocol or is it standard RS232? I'd bet proprietary. You could do some serial with IBM with some adapters, but usually you have something like Twinax by default with something like SNA as a protocol. If it's more modern, you might be looking at a Token Ring connector that plugged into a MAU. I do miss token ring.. It was pretty elegant on the wire.. NAUN, etc... <sigh> (OK, "modern" token ring was CAT5 and you could even do 100M, tho I moved on to ethernet before I got my hands on that. Still, a 16M token ring device could perform as well as a 100M ethernet on a HUB at higher speeds actually... No collisions to worry about...) Edited February 5, 2021 by desiv Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 9 minutes ago, bluejay said: Interesting. Do IBM terminals have some proprietary protocol or is it standard RS232? Very much proprietary, along with them not using ASCII (they used EBCDIC) and specialized keyboards with lots of extra keys: Very interesting that such a large and expensive device was required to turn a Macintosh into a terminal for these IBM machines. ..Al 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 Here's an article on Wikipedia that goes into detail about IBM 3270 terminals for their mainframes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempest Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 46 minutes ago, Albert said: Very much proprietary, along with them not using ASCII (they used EBCDIC) and specialized keyboards with lots of extra keys: Very interesting that such a large and expensive device was required to turn a Macintosh into a terminal for these IBM machines. ..Al I had one of those keyboard at one point. Never knew what it went to. 24 Function keys, that has to be a record! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluejay Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 26 minutes ago, Tempest said: I had one of those keyboard at one point. Never knew what it went to. 24 Function keys, that has to be a record! One can never have enough of those! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempest Posted February 5, 2021 Share Posted February 5, 2021 IBM over engineered the crap out of everything back then. Unlike now where all their stuff is half-baked at best. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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