We are probably moving in less than a year, and the owner is thinking of
getting separate office and warehouse buildings.  The idea is to save money on
rent by getting a small office-only building near our current location, and a
warehouse bldg off where rents are lower (of course, LA standards for "low"
might not be low by any sane standard).

So the first question is how much extra $ to allow for datacomm.  We don't
really need to know HOW to make thinks work yet, just approx how much
two-building communications will cost (both phone system and computers), so
management will know how big the rent savings need to be.  My experience has
all been within one building, so I am pretty clueless here.

Could anybody send me a wild guess on monthly costs ?

Actually, I'm hoping for numbers that will kill the whole idea of two
buildings.  Even if the data-comm works out, there would be a lot of
inconvenience and lost productivity.  And my idea of helping users with their
computer problems has always been to start by walking over to see for myself.

Just for reference:
Phone system has a T1 and a bunch of plain-old lines.  The warehouse might
have about 10 extensions.
Our computer datacomm is just one cheapo dsl line.
Approx 40+ total computer users, mixed serial dumb terminals and network PCs
with Reflection or Minisoft (most PC users spend most of their time in the
terminal emulator).  About 30% of our users are in the warehouse.
Warehouse MUST have good access to our old HP3000 apps.
The HP3000 would need to print to several warehouse printers, both networked
lasers and serial impact printers.
We would need FTP from the HP3000 to a warehouse PC.
We do cross-network tape backups, which we would like to keep but could work
around.  Otherwise we don't do much fancy PC server stuff that would need to
go between buildings.
We are a really small DP staff (myself and an operator), and our datacomm
ignorance is massive.

Here's what really scares me.  Our HP3000 apps use lots of fancy escape codes
and are pretty picky about timing and flow control.  I'm talking about codes
from the HP that cause the terminal to automagically send something back.
Last time I tried setting up dial-in access, the best I could get was
command-prompt worked, but apps would hang at the first of those escape
sequences.  I don't really need dial-in -- just trying to make the point that
some communications setups that work for other sites might not work for us.
And no, I don't think I can re-write to remove those tricks -- they drive a
point-and-shoot, drill-down inquiry system that is at the heart of our MPE
world.  Without them our "move" might as well be a "migration", but we don't
want to go there.

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