I have successfully interfaced a Global Village Teleport Bronze II modem to a Mac Plus.

The GlobalFax Bronze II modem was bundled with Performas some time ago. They look almost identical to the Teleport 56K modems Global Village is currently shipping. Though nifty looking, the Bronze is an almost minimally useful 2400 baud - good only for chat and e-mail - but the fax portion is 9600 baud which is the fastest most fax machines support.

Not only are these old modems nifty looking that can be useful too. I have set up three of my trailing-edge friends with old toaster Macs, a Teleport Bronze II, and a separate screen-name on my main AOL account.

One of my friends is on a job search. Right at this moment she is using one of my old Mac Pluses to fax resumes to about 40 potential employers. What little workhorses these old machines are! Her Plus is running 7.5.3, she is editing her cover letters with WordPerfect, and she has Global Village Fax Center launched too! And she is faxing using an old Global Village Teleport.

The problem with using these modems on a Plus is they get their power from the ADB (keyboard/mouse) port, not found on the poor old Plus. So I made a special keyboard cable that tapped the +5 volt power from the Plus keyboard cable to a ADB connector (sold as a S-video connector at Radio Shack.)

Here are the instructions to make the cable:

- Remove the keyboard cable from the Plus.

- Looking from the cord end of one of these connectors you will see the four wires, yellow, green, red, black. Here's how the connector looks when viewed from the cord end:

(Use monospaced font)

      ___
     |   |
 ____|   |____
|             |
| Yl Gn Rd Bk |
|             |
|_____________|

- Cut the outer insulating jacket about one inch from one of the two connectors.

- Cut insulation from the yellow and black wires. Solder a two foot long red wire to the keyboard cable's yellow wire. Solder a two foot long black wire to the keyboard cable's black wire.

- Get a female mini-din (S-video) connector. Viewing from the solder end, you'll notice the pins arranged in a trapezoid pattern.

 o  o

o    o      (solder end view)

- Solder the red wire to the upper left pin. Solder the black wire to the upper right pin

 r  b

o    o      (solder end view)

- Insulate all your splices.

- Plug the keyboard cable in with the splices closest to the Mac Plus system unit.

- Plug the Bronze II into the modem port and the other modem cable into the s-video cable.

You now have a snazzy-looking 2400 baud modem attached to your Plus. But wait. There's more!

The fax software bundled with the Performa will work with the Plus, but the hot ticket is to use the fax software bundled with the Teleport Platinum. This software is slick as can be. If you read a review on Global Village modems, the reviewer invariably raves about how nice the fax software is. If you install this latest fax software on a machine equipped with a Teleport Bronze, the Teleport control panel even correctly identifies the Bronze!

Kudos to Global Village to continue supporting dinosaur equipment so well. It gives me some confidence that GV will continue to support products I buy today some years down the road. It also results in more sales for GV because I was so impressed with the GV Bronze and its software, that I bought a GV Platinum for my 8500.

(If anybody wants to donate their old Teleport Silvers (or faster) to the purpose of getting old Macs on the internet for trailing edge users, e-mail me.)

mike_friese@lgarde.com