Prize For Retro Challenge

Retro Acorn is happy to be put up a prize for the Retro Challenge.

It's an Acorn Pocketbook 2 (badged Psion Series 3a).

Finally got some time to actually do something for my RC.

Tried to get my USB modem to work with my Windows 8 machine but the drivers are pretty much useless and it isn't detected automatically.
Finally decided to break out my old XP laptop, problem is that the keyboard doesn't work so found a USB one and got it up and running.

While I was at it found a replacement one on ebay so may get round to sorting it out before the end of the month.

Connected up the modem to the C-Tel analogue PABX that I bought a while ago for the purpose of providing old school dialing between machines and possibly the internet.

To test the PABX was working and everything should be ok before I start on the older machines I grabbed my old Acorn Pocket Book 2 and Psion 3 Fax Modem and wired them in.

Using the comms software on the Pocket Book and a copy of Putty on the PC I tried dialing the PC.

At this point the Psion modem started with the usual warbling but the PC wasn't happy at all.
I tried dialing the other way round, the USB modem was not having any of it.

I then remembered the laptop had a built in modem and after a few minutes finding the driver online all was good.

Found my Psion 8mb SSD with the internet suite installed and tried dialing the PC using the built in dial in settings, the PC responded but the error in the log indicates that the Psion didn't authenticate correctly.

So at least I have the two machines dialing each other, next step is to setup some kind of dialup server or BBS, have looked at Synchronet and may have a play with that before trying one of the other machines.