EVERHART%ARISIA.DECnet@GE-CRD.ARPA (04/13/88)
In reply to John Manly's question about a cheap pc to vax connection... Have you looked over VTKermit, which appeared on VAX and RSX SIG tapes awhile back now? It did menus, scripts, autodial, and so on, and would have made it trivial to set up an auto transfer script to send/get whatever you want moved between pc and vax. Sure, it'll use Kermit protocol and without long packets, but until you start with the new C-Kermit based kermit on VMS long packets aren't an option anyhow. Alternatively, there's a script language in the MS-Kermit 2.30 release which might reduce the fruit salad one needs to type to get files moved. On the PC there are lots of PD packages that know how to do scripts, and auto login over a local line tends to be very reliable (those disgusting noise bursts don't happen unless your local thunderstorm maybe zaps the whole country round...). Ditto amiga to Vax. Any decent scripting language can handle it. Kermit is somewhat advantageous in that it does wildcards fairly intelligently and saves you from some of the more bizarre msdos filenames people occasionally come up with. Having VAX kermit set to File Type Fixed (if you have 3.3.111) or file type binary produces something that ALWAYS transfers OK, always comes back to the PC like it left, and works on the VAX OK, modulo maybe passing it thru TECO to regenerate ASCII record structures for text files. Even that may be unnecessary for files that get dumped to bytestream devices like terminals or printers. Glenn Everhart Everhart%Arisia.decnet@GE-CRD.arpa