EinTrans

EinTrans moves files between a PC and a Tatung Einstein TC01 over a serial cable. It was written in 2002 by Ste Ruddy as an in house utility at Software Creations. From Windows you can browse the Einstein's drives, send and fetch individual files, send and fetch whole disc images, and format a disc.

What Is in the Download

This is the EinTrans 2.00 package, dated November 2002:

• WinEinTrans.exe, the Windows program shown in the screenshot
• EinTrans.exe, a command line version of the same tool
• EinTrans.chm, the full help file

Getting It Onto the Einstein First

The PC program talks to a small program, EINTRANS.COM, running on the Einstein. An Einstein without a system disc has nothing to run it from, so there is a companion utility, EinSys.zip. You run EinSys on the PC and type a short boot program into the Einstein in hexadecimal through the MOS. That program pulls the rest across the serial cable and creates a system disc with EINTRANS.COM on it. From then on, EinTrans does the work.

You Will Need

• A Tatung Einstein TC01 with a working floppy drive, or a Gotek.
• A PC with a serial port. Dean Belfield found USB adapters built on the CH340 chip unreliable with handshaking, so a built in port or a PCI serial card is the safer choice.
• A null modem cable wired for the Einstein. Nobody currently sells one, so it has to be made; the wiring diagram is in the guide.

Full Instructions

Dean Belfield's guide to EinTrans covers building the cable, installing EINTRANS.COM with EinSys, and running the program on Windows and on Linux under Wine.

Credits and Preservation

EinTrans and EinSys were written by Ste Ruddy, and both programs carry his 2002 copyright. Chris Coxall archived the binaries on his Connecting Computers site. Dean Belfield, who used EinTrans himself at Software Creations, has since reverse engineered it: his GitHub project holds a disassembly of EINTRANS.COM that rebuilds an identical binary, and a Python library for talking to it from a modern computer.

Both zips were previously downloadable from Dean's own server, but those links no longer work, so TatungBytes hosts them here.