general_vagueness wrote:

For that matter, for a direct cable connection, you wouldn't actually need the cable, just a few good quality insulated wires, 8 for Ethernet or 3 to 9 for RS-232; being simple formats, they didn't have any components in the plugs, just conductors.

I hadn't thought of it that way before. Unfortunately, since most PC serial ports are male, you'd have a hard time keeping the wires attached to the appropriate pins (unless you got a gender changer, in which case you might as well just get a cable instead).

I wasn't aware that the communication ports on old Macs were RS-232 compatible at all. They're certainly not shaped the same way.

actually I don't know about Mac ports, I just assumed they had serial ports because that's about the most generic port there is, and I might have been thinking about the fact that I read once* about an external modem that was used on a PC, a Mac, and a (!) TRS-80
*it was DOS for Dummies, second edition, where I got 55-70% of my DOS knowledge (commands and such), the rest from people, exprerience, and <sarcasm>a mysterious, anicent mystic text</sarcasm> on DOS (4.01), by Que books (FAT, clusters and segments, memory pages, etc.), and I only have a few pages of it now, they kept falling out and I threw them away for some reason, then sections of it, and then I wanted the book again and found like 20 pages

anyway I got the idea (aside from being "T3H NUSKOO7 0LDSKOOL H4X0R" and one of the brightest bulbs in the universe-- I mean box;) from (!) Microsoft
in their on-line help material for late versions of DOS, they included, buried in the part about INTERLNK, or maybe it was INTERSVR (which you probably don't remember, they were the best DOS came with as far as networking), a part where it said you didn't need a null modem cable, you could just connect pins (IIRC) #3 to #6, 6 to 3, and 5 to 5 for basic operation, and 4<->5, 2<->7, and 8<->9 for full functionality
and I've done it myself
that is to say, I was seeing what I could see as far as signals connecting pins to LEDs or an ammeter or a speaker or a buzzer, and it was always nothing, until I tried it with an Atari joystick (so I know that's not RS-232 compatible!)
I did it by simply wrapping wires around straightened paprer clips and other wires, thinner or thicker depending on the pin (I tried this with a bunch of stuff), but yeah, that's still really hard unless the fit is very snug
and they don't need to be regular wires, or even insulated, which brings me to what may be the ultimate hardware hack: connecting computers using twisty-ties with the plastic or paper taken off

I keep meaning to make short posts, and yet...