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From: vancleef@iastate.edu (Van Cleef Henry H)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: how to set up a remote terminal?
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.010639.15124@news.iastate.edu>
Date: 3 Apr 91 01:06:39 GMT
References: <18486@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Lines: 61

In article <18486@csli.Stanford.EDU> ramaley@csli.Stanford.EDU (Alan Ramaley) writes:
>Hi folks.  I've got a question about how to connect a dumb terminal to
>a pc.  Let me tell you what I'm doing.
>
>I'm the music director at KZSU, Stanford's radio station.  Like any
>other radio station, we report charts to trade magazines, and we also
>mail out a monthly chart.  Our charts are entirely based on airplay,
>so we need to keep track of what DJ's are playing.
>
>Our present system involves putting new records in a numbered
>"A-file".  When DJ's do their shows, they write down the numbers of
>the A-file records they play, and put this list is a box.  We come by,
>tally up all the records played, and do a ranking by number of plays.
>
>The only problem is, this takes a lot of time, and it needs people who
>know a lot to always be around to run the tallying, and it requires
>honesty, and there's always mistakes.  So I want to computerize the
>process.
>I could put a pc in the studio with the DJ's; but I want the
>expensive hardware locked in a room, for security as well as
>maintenance reasons.
>
>The solution?  Put a pc in my office, but connect a dumb
>terminal in the DJ studio to it, so DJ's can input the A-file numbers,
>but can't do anything else.  So how should I do this?
>
>(1)	I could try to split the video signal, and put a keypad and a
>monitor in with the DJ's; but I'm concerned about issues of signal
>degradation over the 40 feet the signal would need to travel, and how
>I would go about splitting the video from a pc anyway.
>
>(2)	I could hook up a dumb terminal to a serial port, and write a
>program to manage it; however, I don't have the faintest idea how to
>do this.
>
>If you can email me pointers to the right technical books on these
>matters, or if you've dealt with similar problems yourself, I'd be
>very grateful.
>
>--
>Alan Aitken Ramaley
>(415) 497-5265, P. O. Box 9217, Stanford, CA  94309
>Senior, Symbolic Systems
>Aquarius
>-- 
>Alan Aitken Ramaley
>(415) 497-5265, P. O. Box 9217, Stanford, CA  94309
>Senior, Symbolic Systems
>Aquarius

I don't know whether it is true of all PC's, but some will boot up 
through the serial port if no video card is installed.  I know that
this is true of NEC machines.  This would give you one console located
on COM 1.  

Alternative is to install on of the Unix systems---you can have as many 
terminals as you can supply ports for (multiport I/O cards available
for this).  Also gives login/password security.

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