I am trying to get a RealBasic program to communicate with my IBM 8088 (a tremendously old PC) so that the 8088 can be used to act as a simple text terminal controlling another program.
Having not been a geek back in the times where modems and serial data was used, I have no idea how serial communications work. I simply want to plug the two computers together and have them talk to each other. I have been (unsuccessfully) messing around with a simple terminal program for the 8088 that I wrote and ZTerm, and so far, have gotten nowhere.
I have gotten the 8088 to talk to a modem just fine, and have even tried to get the computers to talk to each other through modems. I have been able to get them to talk by putting them each on their own phone line and one dialing the other, but I don't want to tie up any phone lines to get my computers to communicate. Plugging the two modems together through a phone cord doesn't work, I'm assuming that phone data has to go through some kind of switching station, for all the same reasons that plugging two telephones together won't work.
I tried just plugging the computers together with a simple serial cable, but that doesn't work either. Im thinking I need a null modem cable, am I correct? If so, how can I make a null modem cable?
I also have two modems that I don't mind running a phone cable between, if such a thing works without having a switching station in between to produce a dial tone and rings.
Please help!
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