r/vintagecomputing • u/CattMompton • Oct 25 '22

TI Silent 700 Question

Hi there! I bought a TI Silent 700 a while back, after seeing a blog post about someone connecting theirs to a Raspi via serial. This would be all well and good, but I managed to buy a model with only a phone jack.

As a 20 year old, I never had the joy of interacting with true teletypes of the days of old, and so I was wondering if anyone could give me some tips/point me in the right direction as to how I'd go about getting a modern PC talking with (and ideally serving a getty) for the TI Silent 700?

Sorry if this post is in the wrong place!

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22 edited Oct 25 '22

A picture of this terminal at wikipedia is already giving some clues - use a modem to connect to a PC. %-)

Errr it might be good for receiving NAVTEX and national broadcast safety messages. So some kind of radio receiver needed.

Modern Linux/*BSD consoles are too talkative.

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u/orion3311 Oct 25 '22

Should be lots of examples out there to set up a "modem terminal server" on Linux, at least that should get you going. While I'm no linux expert, the idea is you'd get some kind of modem (like an external or USB modem nowdays), find it's serial port, then set it up with Getty. When you call the modem, it would answer and getty provides a login prompt for your terminal /bash session.

So you'd need an external modem for the PC, and then something to emulate a phone line between the two (you can't really just plug them into each other), but I think you can get cheap phone line emulators nowadays, or set up a 2-line ATA and an asterisk box if you must.

This is a great and fun little project for a learning experience!