barry@primerd.prime.com (09/17/89)
My wife works at a non-profit school for emotionally disturbed and
learning disabled children. The secretaries at the school use IBM PC
clones with MS Word 5 to prepare the many educational plans and
reports required by the local school systems that send disabled
students to the school. Many of the teachers have Apple II systems,
which they use to prepare draft material for these reports.
Unfortunately, all of this material is being rekeyed into Word. The
school is looking for an inexpensive, reliable way to transfer ASCII
text from the Apple II systems to the PC clones; transfer in the
reverse direction is not a major requirement.
The two basic options appear to be transfer via a common disk format
or transfer via an RS-232 connection.
1. All of the systems have 5.25" floppies. Is there
software for the IBM (Apple) that can read simple ASCII
text files written on an Apple (IBM) system? If so,
where can they get it and how much does it cost.
2. Assuming that the floppy transfer option is not possible
or is too expensive, it should be possible to connect the
two systems via a null modem cable and use telecomm
software on either end that share a common transfer
protocol. All of the files are likely to be quite small
and the connection will be hard wired (>= 9600 baud?), so
almost any protocol will do. What freeware or inexpensive
programs would be suitable (for both Apple and IBM)?
None of the users are computer experts, so ease of use is
a major factor.
I'm sorry if the answers to these questions are obvious - I normally
use Macs, Primes, and Suns. Thanks in advance for your help.
Please respond by mail.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry Wolman | barry@s66.prime.com
Principal Technical Consultant | 492 Old Connecticut Path
Prime Computer | Framingham, MA 01701
| 508/626-1700, ext. 4187
------------------------------------------------------------------------abc@BRL.MIL (Brinton Cooper) (09/19/89)
In your wife's situation, I'd get "kermit" running on the Apples and the IBM PC. It was MADE for file transfers among dissimilar systems. You probably have it on some of the hosts that you used. It's available a lot of ways including anonymous FTP from columbia. Some of the commercial and shareware PC programs even include the kermit protocol as an option. Kermit for the apple is available from the APPLE2-L LISTSERVER at BROWNVM.BITNET; if you can send Internet mail, you can get kermit from there for the Apple. Good luck. Should work easily. _Brint