Does anyone know anything about an ATEX system?
A friend works for a local newspaper, and they use a system called ATEX
(that is the only name anyone seems to know it by) to submit stories to
press. It has a remote dial-in ability and I just wasted 3 hours tonight
trying to teach my friend's friend how to use a terminal program to
access the system (it would have been less time if my friend would have
shut up and stopped trying to help... he just couldn't grasp that Zterm
on the mac that he uses shares no common abilities with HyperTerm on
windows that his friend is using).
My point to this is, I realized after spending 3 hours on this, that in
the SAME 3 hours, I could have written a simple GUI application to speak
to the system and made life a million times easier. When I mentioned this
to him and his friend, they started to drool. It seems most of the
writers there use the remote ATEX dialup, and they ALL hate the command
line terminals. He said people there would love to get access to a nice
friendly program. That of course sang songs of Shareware into my head.
So my question is... what are the possible commands that ATEX can use? My
friend knows a handful of the basic common ones, which is a good starting
ground, but he doesn't use all the features. He also knows there are
features he uses from the terminals at work, that he can't use from home,
because there are custom keys for them (I am sure they are just F keys
that are mapped to certain commands, but that is above his head). He said
he will try to get info on the system, but having dealt with the paper's
IT staff before, I am sure he will hit a road block.
I am looking for any info that anyone might have on one of these systems.
I am SURE it is classic, as I know the same terminals are in use now as
were in use when I toured the paper's offices in the 3rd grade.
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>