On Thu, 01 Aug 2013, Mark Hofmann wrote to Mark Lewis:



ml> i remember, back in the day, fighting serial comms a lot... then i
found ml> the FOSSIL stuff, ripped out everything i had been fighting
with 
ml> and just talked to the FOSSIL from then on... all the problems were 
ml> solved in an instant... the projects then only needed to load x00 
ml> or bnu and off we went...

 MH> If I remember correctly, WWIV was a bit late in the game to have
 MH> fossil support. 

yep... i was doing the above stuff after spending $$$ on and working with a
serial library for DBIV projects... mainly for talking to different weight
scales for things like package shipping weights and even before and after
weights of vehicles dropping off or picking up loads of product... one of
my favorite was a truck scale at a raw materials storage place where they
had different grades of sand, gravel and salt... that same program was also
used for grain and liquid materials like milk and chemical
transportation... it was very interesting and quite satisfying work after i
replaced the hard serial stuff with FOSSIL access code ;)

 MH> I remember most Fido compatible systems were fossil, but WWIV was
 MH> still COM port based for years.  I loaded the X00 driver for some
 MH> doors back in the day, but that was it.  

yeah... many systems did that... WWIV and several derivatives had the same
basic method of talking to the serial port and the local console... i
remember they were pretty easy to get to a console command line from remote
using CTTY and pointing it to the serial port... they didn't have to mess
with doorway at all... but if something happened, the CTTY was still
pointed at the serial port and the machine had to be rebooted to recover...

 MH> I was early to support telnet with WWIV thanks to the Raymond Gwinn
 MH> SIO drivers (which I still use to this day).  :)

i (still) do the same here with my RA/FD/FE system ;)

)\/(ark

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