LR>>Hi, Neil.  Does OS/2 support an ARTIC?  Does UNIX?  I know

1) Yes, and 2) I don't know.  I've used ARTIC under both OS/2 1.2 and
1.3 and it works fine.

LR>>there is support by IBM for GPIB under DOS.  I didn't know
LR>>IBM supported their GPIB via microchannels tho.

I could be wrong on this because I don't have the docs at hand, but I'm
pretty sure this is correct.  There's a daughterboard that fits onto the
ARTIC card (WARNING:  Extra cost option for both serial and GPIB
connections; the basic ARTIC card comes without any connection to the
outside world whatsoever and you have to buy one of the daughtercards to
get the ARTIC to actually do any work).

LR>>How did your system work at the concept level.  If you can
LR>>use pseudo code then might make the concepts more
LR>>comprehensible to me.

Well, it would get into a pretty long message, but the basic idea was to
interface PC's to semiconductor process and measurement tools that
communicated via the SECS (Semiconductor Equipment Communication
Standard) protocol.  The PC would provide a "friendly" user interface
that would allow operators to automatically load and start a tool (even
remotely), while the PC would contain enough intelligence to monitor for
warnings and serious errors from the tools and shut them down if
warranted, broadcasting an error message to the LAN.  At the code level,
a standard finite state machine controlled the various setup, run and
monitor states.

Since the tools normally sent process and measurement data during the
run, there needed to be a way to buffer the data without getting into
realtime polling of the serial connection which would bring the PC to
its knees.  This is where the ARTIC card came in.  With it monitoring
the port, the OS/2 app could do other things (like starting a process on
another tool; the ARTIC can handle up to 8 serial connections as I
recall, buffering them separately with a unique identifier.  This
means we could run 8 different tools from the single PC) without
having to worry that we'd miss an important error message or some data.

Is that enough detail for you?  I'm not sure what your app is trying to
do to know whether this would be an appropriate solution.
___
 X SLMR 2.0 X Vermont: We have two seasons here, winter and August!

--- Maximus/2 2.01wb