Another great WWNC lies behind, and as before, it’s a great motivator to get started again with hacking the Newton. I wanted to pick up where I left off with porting the btstack BlueTooth stack to the Newton. Now that Matthias has merged his changes into the main Einstein branch, I was able to make some good progress to integrate the serial driver which allows to talk to a physical port on the host side.
One of the test cases for serial connectivity is to connect to the Dock application. Unfortunately I was not able to get this to work from MacOS 8 running in BasiliskII (the serial port appears to be busy), but the RDCL came again to the rescue, and I was able to download the Names soup from Einstein via a pty connection.
Working on Einstein has been a lot of fun, and we’ve made good progress adding improvements on the implementation and development process. Another fun blast from the past in this context is that I was able to add a fix for the 2010 problem also to Einstein!