[Coco] more that one shell from an external terminal(update)

Fri Sep 18 16:05:24 EDT 2015

George, the DW4 way I described would work for you, but it involves using Drivewire4. You could monitor as many 'shells' as you like from the PC.

You could even do this from your startup by creating all the PC terminals every time you boot... Let's say you wanted 2 terminals open running their own shells:

-- startup stuff --
shell i=/z1&
shell i=/z2&
-- rest of startup stuff --

Using this, as soon as you boot up, 2 terminal windows will appear on your PC in 80x24 text. You can run most any text based application from these windows just as if you are sitting at the Coco (no graphics).
Of course, this is using DW4, but it's also faster than a regular serial port connection as it's running 115kb!

>From these windows, you can even mount DSKs and VHDs directly into DW4 without bringing up the DW4 server GUI, but that's another story for another time :-)
DW4 offers all you are asking and much more. A lot of people don't use DW4 because they don't want their Coco 'tethered' to a PC, but you're doing that anyway, so why not DW4? And all it takes is a modified serial cable which you'll be running for the serial connection anyway.

If what you are trying to do is monitor your external Coco experiments, this would be perfect for that! Any text based cmd can be run from these windows.. even TSEdit. I think there's a list on the DW4 wiki of what control codes it supports, if not, I'm sure Aaron could tell you.

Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: George Ramsower <georgera at gvtc.com>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Fri, Sep 18, 2015 2:45 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] more that one shell from an external terminal(update)

On 9/18/2015 2:31 AM, Bill Pierce via Coco wrote:

  Big <snip> here....
>
>
In this experiment (which again, was DW4 based), I could find no way to create a
shell from a terminal and then switch to it. Someone with a little more
knowledge may know a trick or two that I don't (many do) and may be able to do
this, but I saw no way to be able to send the proper control codes for it to
switch and the terminal had no way of knowing any different. As stated above, I
did get 4 individual terminals going and could switch between them on the PC,
with all 4 showing at once.
>
>
> And.... I had a lot of fun trying... :-)
>
>

I was thinking on this last night....

  For one thing, we would not be creating
a shell. They should already 
be created, just like windows (w1, w2,<etc>).  The
shells for those 
windows are already there. The window is just waiting for an
input, 
AFTER a person begins using the keyboard, once selecting that window. I

expect changing to another port descriptor might be the same. Again, 
just
guessing here. But how would this be done? And how the heck could a 
port
descriptor be changed or how to change to a different shell.... oh, 
this gets
confusing. It seems the answer would be in the way OS9 does it 
for the
keyboard.... another shell on that same keyboard.
  A detailed knowledge of OS9
and it's inner workings would be very 
helpful here.
  I'm guessing here. I
suppose these shells would be assigned to that 
com port such as /t2 or some
such.. maybe.
  I haven't tried this or experimented with it in the past...
never 
thought about doing this until just the other day when working at the

"term" on the coco is becoming so painful. With a bad back and the

uncomfortable seating in that room, an alternative would be really nice.

Otherwise, I need to make some serious changes in that room which I call 
the
"Darkroom" as it was originally set up to be for photo processing. I 
haven't
done film for over five years now and it looks like that is 
going to be history
now.

  So... I can still use this PC through a com port on the coco and it is

a lot more comfortable to use it this way.
  But this idea of switching shells
from a remote terminal seems like a 
great possibility, if it can be done. I'm
not thoroughly convinced it is 
possible but what a great thing if it can be
done!! This would save me a 
lot of foot work and pain.
  On that coco, I'm
constantly switching from one window to another 
while working with or even
developing another process with Basic09. 
Basic09 is my "dream app". With that
and the hardware I have, anything 
is possible.
  See my limited information on
this at 
http://coco.thetinbox.com/CNCCoco.html.
  That's only ONE example of
what can be done. Right now, I'm using 
those same ports to monitor old
mechanical clocks, using switches on the 
clock for reading from the coco. One
homemade clock is only a pendulum 
right now but the coco is monitoring it for
accuracy. Eventually it will 
morph into a battery operated, pendulum clock that
uses the pendulum 
solely for the purpose of controlling the clock
movement.

Dangit!! The pain pills are starting to do their job now and I'm

beginning to ramble on...

"Looking for less painful ways to do
things"....
George R.

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