Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!stanford.edu!csli!ramaley
From: ramaley@csli.Stanford.EDU (Alan Ramaley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: how to set up a remote terminal?
Message-ID: <18487@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 Apr 91 07:42:50 GMT
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 49

Hi folks.  I've got a question about how to connect a dumb terminal to
a mac.  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 mac 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 mac 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 mac 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