phone

[[e-mail]]

Rather than having a comms program do an:

ATDT1234

or

ATDTnews.eternal-september.org:119

would it be better for the OS to accept an:

fopen("news.eternal-september.org:119", "w+");

I'm guessing that the class of comms programs for
MSDOS were dictated by the fact that we didn't have
control of the operating system rather than hardcoding
COM1 being a good idea.

Obviously I expect the OS to translate the above fopen/open
into INT 14H BIOS calls to whatever COM port (or ethernet
or wifi) has access to the outside world.

And maybe there should be a nickname for the news server
in case I switch provider.

BFN. Paul.

[Rod Pemberton]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2021 05:43:30 -0700 (PDT)

Post by ***@gmail.com
fopen("news.eternal-september.org:119", "w+");

Well, I see nothing specifying the device you're connecting to ...

Without specifying the device, how does the open routine decide to
connect to the serial port instead of disk device, such as A: or
/dev/sda1 etc?


E.g., the path would probably need to start with news:// or https://
etc, like paths in the web browser, to specify the device and protocol
to use with fopen().

Or, the info might need to be formatted like an ftp login, which is
similar:

ftp://user:***@host:port/path


Of course, NNTP uses telnet to connect to Usenet servers. So, maybe,
it should have the same info as telnet, but ...

telnet -l user host port

... but be formatted more like ftp or http:

telnet://user:***@host:port

If not an anonymous login like for news servers, the password for
telnet is prompted for, which will require more work to implement.


Soooo ... It seems that you read voidstar's message in regards to
Watcom's special :> operator but didn't read mine? See the last half
of the last line. Gotcha! I caught you sleeping. lol. ;-)

[[e-mail]]

Post by Rod Pemberton

Post by ***@gmail.com
fopen("news.eternal-september.org:119", "w+");

Well, I see nothing specifying the device you're connecting to ...
Without specifying the device, how does the open routine decide to
connect to the serial port instead of disk device, such as A: or
/dev/sda1 etc?

The ":" in the name is an indication that it is a URL.
nntp://news.eternal-september.org
would also work.

But without the "nntp://", the ":" should be the indicator.

That's what telnet accepts too, in some implementations, right?

Post by Rod Pemberton
Soooo ... It seems that you read voidstar's message in regards to
Watcom's special :> operator but didn't read mine? See the last half
of the last line. Gotcha! I caught you sleeping. lol. ;-)

I did read your message, but I would have skipped right
over something that says "special". I'm not interested in
writing anything Watcom-specific.

It was only when I saw clearly invalid code, and in fact
I've never seen anything like that before, that I decided
to reply and say that he had a problem with his cut
and paste. Something else had looked odd too, so I
thought there was some unrelated technical problem.

But I realized I had Watcom on my own disk so I could
find the actual code.

BFN. Paul.

[Rod Pemberton]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2021 06:39:55 -0700 (PDT)

Post by ***@gmail.com
But I realized I had Watcom on my own disk so I could
find the actual code.

Did you ever install DJGPP?

Lots of solutions in there right along the
lines of what you've been doings.

[[e-mail]]

Post by Rod Pemberton

Post by ***@gmail.com
But I realized I had Watcom on my own disk so I could
find the actual code.

Did you ever install DJGPP?

Nope.

Post by Rod Pemberton
Lots of solutions in there right along the
lines of what you've been doings.

Solutions to what problem?

BTW, I have my own GCC/binutils toolchain. I use
the same GCC on the 80386 that I use on S/370.

BFN. Paul.