🚀 go-pugleaf

jimv@hienergy.east.sun.com says: 
>  "I have acquired a DG/1 laptop....but I can't seem to get
>  any comm software to talk to the serial port."

You'll probably want to hunt down the November 1984 issue of BYTE magazine
and read the cover story (a "product description", not a review):

    "The Data General One" by Gregg Williams and Ken Sheldon.
    BYTE, November 1984, Vol. 9, num. 12, pp. 102-109.

It has been a while since I examined a DG/1, but if I recall correctly,
DG's quest for low-power operation with 1984 technology (uh, chips made
that year, not Big Brother viewscreens) led the designers at Nippon Data
General to use a serial UART chip different from the 8520- or 14650-type
devices usually employed in MS-DOS machines.  Ergo, software that expects
to directly drive the 8520 chip can't find it.

All is not lost, however.  The DG/1's BIOS knows how to talk to whatever
UART it has, though, so if your communication software used BIOS calls
then it might possibly work.  I believe also that a special version of
MS-DOS Kermit for the DG/1 is available from Columbia University (FTP from
the host watsun.cc.columbia.edu).

Since source code for the driver that MS-Kermit uses is available, you
could with some amount of labor incorporate it into a SLIP driver for your
TCP/IP.  (Better yet, forget SLIP and write a PPP, point-to-point-protocol,
driver for it.)  If you are good at macro-assembler....

The DG/1 is not the only machine that was made with a non-8520 UART:
others were the Seequa Chameleon and the DEC Rainbow 100.  (The UARTs in
both those machines are arguably better than the 8520.)  Then the industry
decided that register-level hardware compatibility with the IBM PC was the
way to go, and those machines faded from importance.
-- 
....Richard S. Shuford  | "Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke
....shuford@cs.utk.edu  |  a wise man and he will love you.  Instruct a wise
....BIX: richard        |  man and he will be wiser still."  Proverbs 9:7 NIV