USER question

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008, Fairlight wrote:
>On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 03:52:01PM -0800, Bill Campbell, the prominent pundit,
>witicized:
>> I wrote a shim program that spawned two processes, similar to what
>> communication programs like ckermit do, sitting between the x286 binary
>> program and the terminal.  The processes communicated with shared memory
>> with the process listening to Filepro intercepting the codes to reprogram
>> function keys, updating the shared memory key map.  The process talking to
>> the terminal and keyboard looked for function keys sent, mapping them to
>
>That's something I've considered...a go-between program for USER that
>handles both ends "separately".

I wrote the program that handles this in C, using low-level terminal
handling code that I wrote in 1985 or for my Unify RDBMS based accounting
software.  It took less than 600 lines of C code (less if one removes
comments), and runs FilePro via a pair of pipes to handle input and output.
I think the last time I compiled this was in November 2003 so it would
require a bit of study to figure out what I did again :-).

>> the appropriate DT-100 codes.  The only difficulty was that it tended to
>> use up shared memory when people didn't log off properly so required
>> manually clearing it.
>
>Doesn't that usually require a reboot? :) I've seen fP 5.0.x and 5.6.x
>(when 5.6 was new) not quite work well together and actually break the
>shared memory segment and neither version would use it correctly after
>that.  Only way it seemed to be clearable was with a reboot.  Might be
>possible if you knew the exact memory range to clear though, but I didn't.

It doesn't require rebooting.  There are utilities to list shared memory
usage, clear it, etc., but I always have to poke around to remember what
they are.  This customer has since retired and shut down their business
that they were running on an SCO OSR 5.0.6a system (had to to run the x286
Xenix binaries :-).  Unfortunately they took their IBM xSeries tower to the
local PC recycler before telling me so I did not get a chance at it.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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