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ArsTechnica has a fun project--hacking a TRS-80 to get online:
The true test of a man's patience is crimping pins onto the end of a cable that leads to building a custom serial cable—especially if it's the first time you've even handled a serial cable in a decade. So as I searched under my desk, using my phone for a flashlight, I wondered whether I had finally found the IT project that would send me over the edge. On a recent day, I set out to turn my recently acquired vintage Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer into a working Internet terminal. And at this moment, I crawled on the floor looking for a DB-25 connector's little gold pin that I had dropped for the sixth—or maybe sixteenth—time.
Thankfully, I underestimated my patience/techno-masochism/insanity. Only a week later, I successfully logged in to Ars' editorial IRC channel from the Model 100. And seeing as this machine first saw the market in 1983, it took a substantial amount of help: a Raspberry Pi, a little bit of BASIC code, and a hidden file from the website of a certain Eric S. Raymond.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:50AM
He dusted off an old computer and fired it up as a dumb terminal, something it was originally designed to do. Then he made a custom serial cable and plugged it into an internet connected linux box. Has serial console access really become so rare that this is a story? In my world, the time consuming part would have been the drive to the local computer store to buy the $5 Startech serial adapter with precrimped loose pins that you just plug into the holes you need for the custom pinout. Always in stock...
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:46AM
Yeah I did the same thing with an Apple IIGS a long time ago. I'm not sure I would count this as surfing the internet. Now if the TRS-80 had a TCP/IP stack and connected using PPP over serial, that would be something. I've done it many times using Amiga and Win machines.
Speaking of custom cables, I once connected an 80MB 2.5" IDE harddisk to an Atari 800XL. Right on the CPU bus. The IDE bus is 16 bits wide, but the registers are mostly only 8-bits wide except for the data register. And the original speed of the IDE bus (PIO 0) was 1.66MHz, whereas the Atari is not much faster at 1.79MHz. Who would have anticipated that translating the logical sector number passed by DOS into C/H/S geometery would waste more time than actually reading the data?