rrw@naucse.cse.nau.edu (Robert Wier) (11/07/90)
Believe it or not, I'm a novice Rainbow user. The College of
Engineering has 16 (count 'em .. 16) Rainbows sitting in a
closet that havn't been used for 5 years or so. I'm in need of
a small amount of computing power to be dedicated 24 hours a
day to such things as recording weather data from an rs 232
port.
Not knowing ANYTHING about Rainbows, I've been looking at the
documentation. Now, we have both CPM and MSDOS (2.?). Since
I will eventually be needing to read the data stored on disk
into an ASCII format text file, I'm trying to decide which
way to go. Right offhand, we have Microsoft Basic for CPM,
and Turbo Pascal under MSDOS (but so far, I can't find a
manual).
Bringing up the Rainbow in Terminal mode, I can successfully
"talk" to the weather station. Now the problem is to write
either a BASIC (CPM) or PASCAL(MSDOS) program to do the
automatic reads to disk. The problem is that looking in the
BASIC manual, I can't figure out how to tie the BASIC input
or inp statement to the communications port (INP specifies
read a byte from port #1 - #255 - but what is the comm port?)
Alternately, maybe Pascal has a better way to handle this.
If I decide to store the data in CPM format, it appears we
have a program that will read it and write it back into
MSDOS format.
Secondly, it appears in BASIC that you CAN'T directly append
data to a sequential disk file. You have to copy the original
file, append to that, and rename back to the original. This is
a major problem, since my data files can only be half as large
that way (if I have to make a copy of the whole file every time
I want to append a new set of reading). Any suggestions on this?
Would greatly appreciate any words of advice from you Rainbow
wizards out there...
THANKS
- Bob Wier
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College of Engineering
Northern Arizona University / Flagstaff, Arizona
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