I've bought a few of the ribless cables from kawamall on ebay, they have worked fine on both HT1000 and MT2000.... as you will have seen the older rss requires very old systems, I haven't tried anything faster than 166mhz so far. You can download MSDOS 7.10 (it's in the public domain now) from several places on the net, and I've found that a good (OLD) laptop is the best platform. I obtain some comfort level in knowing I have a built-in battery independent of UPS or commercial power when programming the radios.
I wrote something about programming ht1000s (although I've been told there is an rss manual out there in pdf, but I haven't been able to locate it) here
http://terminus.attitude.net/motorola-radios hope it helps