A little while ago I poeted a message asking if anyone had an alpha pager
program. My thanks to all that responded.
 
In reaction to the many responses that I received I belive I can enlighen
some others with the information I've found. I like many of the people
who responded I figured that I could just make a simple modification to
one of the existing numeric pager programs that are in the Interact CSL.
I was rather suprised when I did a little reading to find that the alpha
paging sequence is totally different from anything a numeric pager uses.
 
Numeric paging is completely handled by using touch tones that are
generated by a modem attached to the 3000. Alpha pagers, on the other
hand, actually require you to make a modem connection to your paging
company's "pager central". Pager central is just a computer that takes
paging requests, and does the actual paging.
 
Interaction with pager central isn't simply a serial terminal connection,
that would be too easy ;-), it's done using a protocol called IXO or TAP.
These are two names for the same thing. The paging sequece requires the
use of ACK's, NAK's, and a couple of other ASCII characters, as well as
calculation and transmission of a checksum for message validation. All in
all, it doesn't look to horribly difficult to do, just a real pain.
 
My plan was to find someone else who had already written this program to
avoid re-inventing the wheel...
 
Once again, thanks to all who responded...
 
Ray Stevens