Well, after a lot of juryrigging, I got the AlphaSmart to talk PPP-over-USB to the iMac G4. It freezes the Dana if you try to close the connection from PalmOS (better to unplug it and let it time out), but otherwise it works great and can access web pages and files. I also compiled pilot-link and set that up to transfer .prcs and .pdbs to and from the Dana, and that works too.

Next is to see how viable it is as an ssh client.