timt@lakesys.lakesys.com (Tim Thompson) (12/10/90)
Finally; a legitimate posting for this board -
Someone I work with has a friend who has a PRO 350. Don't laugh,
but about 5 years ago, she paid $17,000.00 for it, including a
package which she called "Cimmaron." She was in such a hurry that
I couldn't get enough information from her, but I gathered this much -
She uses Cimmaron in her work as a court stenographer, or something similar.
Her system has a hard drive, and two 5 1/4" floppies, labeled "A" and "B".
She has NO open ports on the back; the ones that are in use are connected
to her serial printer, and some sort of stenographic machine.
I could not get a straight answer out of her as to what sort of
operating system (if any) she has; I guess that she's one of those
types that just turns it on, and goes . . .
She does NOT have a modem.
Anyway, apparently she changed employers. Her new supervisor, or whatever,
requires that she turn in her work on disk. Naturally, (s)he is expecting
them in ASCII/IBM format. This seems to be the problem.
Statements:
No, she does not want to part with the PRO, because of the large investment.
She currently takes her disks somewhere for conversion, at a cost of
$70.00 per disk. Right now, she has 8 disks waiting for conversion.
It would seem that the easy solution would be some sort of program
she could execute, to take the info from one floppy, and write the
appropriate headers, etc. onto the other floppy, in IBM format.
I have NO idea if this is even possible.
Getting a little more involved, she could get a modem, and software,
and either KERMIT or XMODEM them to an IBM PC.
She could also buy her own PC, and connect it directly via the
PRO's printer port, and just receive the incoming data.
Is there a cheap solution?
Is there a software-only solution *** preferred ***
Is there any more information I can provide for a better
analysis of the problem, that would help with a solution?
Contact:
(Please use E-Mail, as NEWSfeeds are not operational!)
--
Timothy R. Thompson
414+769-6700 Monday - Friday, 1:00 PM - 6:30 PM, CST, 414+873-1841 weekends.
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