Mac Equivalent of HyperTerminal

Have you tried Terminal.app found in Applications\Utilties?

If that isn't what you want, here is a comprehensive list of third party Mac terminal applications, some of which are freeware:

http://macorchard.com/terminal/

From what I understood, the OS X terminal client only communicated with other applications, not serial connections.  I've taken a look at one or two of the clients in that list, I noticed that iTerm looked pretty robust.  But I didn't see a way to set bits per second, flow rate, parity, etc...  Do you have to set those by commands in OS X?

You are right about the Mac Terminal. It is a long time since I used a terminal emulator on a Mac. I have used both TN3270 and MacTelnet, but that is years ago and I don't remember if they have the ability to change the settings you refer to. However, there are at least three freeware terminal emulators on the MacOrchard web site. I suggest you download them and give them a try.

I played around with iTerm a bit but didn't see any way to establish a serial connection.  I downloaded ZTerm and installed it, and it will do exactly what I need but OS X isn't recognizing my Radioshack USB Serial adapter (I think that's it's actual name because I managed to find the Windows drivers for it).  

So, now it comes down to getting the serial adapter working properly with OS X.  From the System Profiler I can see the USB-Serial Controller listed under USB Bus, but I'm not really sure where to go from here (still rather new to OS X).  It seems like this would still be an issue with OS X not fully recognizing the device, would that be correct or could it only be ZTerm not recognizing it?

Oh, this thing has been laying around in our office for...probably a good year or so.  I just grabbed it and wanted to see if I could make it work for either OS X or my XP VM.

By the way, just went to the link you posted to the OS X Hax site, followed another link from there (newest post at bottom) to the current drivers for IOGear/ATEN/Prolific devices, and installed them.  ZTerm recognizes the adapter now and I was able to instantly connect to the Cisco router I've been testing with...works like a charm.

Thanks for your help with this, it's made things much easier. :)

For reference, direct link to IOGear/ATEN/Prolific OS X driver:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/

I completely forgot about ZTerm, by the way. That is a really venerable Mac program. I used to use it before the internet to dial into bulletin boards using a 2.4k modem (state of the art!) using a 25 MHz Mac IIcx and OS 6.08!
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