Re: //e as a keyboard?

[dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff)]

cyllin ohmsford (cyllin@aol.com) wrote:
: Hi all.  I've been experimenting with my //e enhanced for a while, 
: mostly in null-modem networking to my PC for file transfers.  In doing 
: so, I found myself wondering if it is possible to write drivers to use 
: the //e as an external keyboard for my PC.  I briefly considered 
: hard-wiring an interface to the keyboard decoder, but I don't have the 
: electronics knowledge I'd need.  This seemed to rule out the possibility 
: of using the keyboard connector on my PC motherboard.  But you could 
: have drivers for keyboard input using a null-modem connection over the 
: serial ports, using, say, COM1 and the SSC port.  I've gotten file 
: transfers to work just fine, but that's only simple serial transfers.  
: For DOS, you'd need to pass the input to the command interpreter, 
: which would best be done by a TSR, rather than passing each complete 
: line as a parameter to a second command shell.  (And I'm not even going 
: to think about Windows.)  Does anyone know of work having been done on a 
: project along those lines, or would anyone be interested in working on 
: it?

I think there is a way to do it through some switch in ANSI.SYS on the PC.
 I have been told that some engineers have done that for DOS programs
(this was in the pre-Windoze days anyway...) in radio stations so that the
PC CPU (with its noisy disk drives and fan) could be remote located and
accessed in the studio with a (fanless and silent) VT-100 terminal
connected to the COM: port on the PC.

I've never done it, but I think it can be done with very little effort.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
-- 
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