It was about as obsolete when I got it as it is now, but it still works. I've scanned the manual: informer-213-ae-manual.pdf.

I didn't have a laptop for most of college, but for some of the time I had a terminal set up in the common area and ran a serial cable back to my desktop in my bedroom.

At one point Blake and I worked on trying to make an RS232-to-ethernet converter box that the serial console could log into and then from there log into a server remotely. We designed the board (eth232.zip) and ordered parts, but never got around to assembling it.

We got two copies of the board printed for free by submitting them to the PIClist contest, and as the only entry that month we won. I recall the person running the contest was skeptical that we would actually write the software for our entry. We assured them that we would, once we had the board, but it turned out they were right and we lost interest while waiting for the parts.