Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!pilchuck!del From: del@Data-IO.COM (Erik Lindberg) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Remote Control of IBM PC Keywords: IBM PC Message-ID: <1023@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM> Date: 28 Oct 88 23:38:30 GMT References: <757@dinl.mmc.UUCP> <[75.1]karl@ddsw1.comp.ibmpc> <1340@micomvax.UUCP> Reply-To: del@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM (Erik Lindberg) Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA Lines: 32 In article <1340@micomvax.UUCP> ray@micomvax.UUCP (Ray Dunn) writes: >In article <[75.1]karl@ddsw1.comp.ibmpc> karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM ([Karl Denninger]) writes: > >Unfortunately (or perhaps naturally, because of the PC's architecture) there >is no current satisfactory general solution to a "remote" control terminal. > >There is perhaps a niche hardware product opportunity here, but it probably >is only relevant in a pure alpha-numeric mode, a minority market. Depends on what you mean by "satisfactory". There are, in fact, a couple of commercial products that allow full remote access of a PC by modem, even for character graphics *and* direct screen writes. I don't know if they can handle graphics as well, but I wouldn't be surprised. One of the products is even CALLED "Remote". These products work by hanging off the timer iterrupt and maintaining a copy of the screen for comparison. Every period the program wakes up, compares the screen with its copy, and sends the differences out the serial port. The companion program, running on the local PC, interprets the difference data and displays. Input is accepted from either keyboard, and of course the function and keypad keys, even action of the shift keys, is transmitted across the serial port. In fact, the only "unsatisfactory" thing about this setup is the speed at which it runs: slowly. There was a review of this setup in PC-Rag a long time ago. They tested it with several programs that did not- so-nice things with the hardware and it seemed to work ok. Notably Lotus 123 seemed to work just fine. -- del (Erik Lindberg) uw-beaver!tikal!pilchuck!del