draper (01/18/83)
Mark Wallen and I here at UCSD have finally got our modems and software here to support call waiting. "Call waiting" is a feature for $3.00 a month the phone company sells me whereby if I am on the phone and someone else calls, I get a beep and can then put my first call on hold while I talk to the second. My aim is to get this to work so that I don't need to buy a second phone line, yet if friends call me when I'm logged in for hours I can detect this and talk to them. The problem was that formerly the computer hung up when I put it on hold because the carrier dropped. Now we have fixed it so that it hangs in there until I get back to it. Other people dialling in will not get connected to my job -- it's still connected to my phone line. When I log out, then the modem hangs up the phone and the line is ready for use again. The only problem is that if anyone using this feature does not logout before hanging up, the line is left busy and no-one can use it (their job will hang around in the machine as well). To fix this we have a daemon to kill jobs automatically on dialin lines that have been idle for more than say 30 min.s without carrier. The only remaining problem with call waiting on computer lines is that the beep appears as only 2 char.s of noise on the screen typically, which can be hard to spot, and will be missed if you've wandered off and aren't actually looking at the screen. We are posting a companion note to net.unix-wizards on what your local wizard should do to get this working on your machine, and the source for the daemon to net.sources. Mark Wallen Steve Draper UCSD, San Diego UCSD, San Diego ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!wallen ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!draper wallen@nprdc draper@nprdc