Doug asks:

> Situation: Two 3000's, one in Maryland, one in California. I have set up
>  the system in MD to be able to print to a networked laser printer in CA,
>  but that is not what they want. They "need" to print from the MD system to
>  a "forms" printer in CA. This is, I suspect, an impact printer for multi-
>  part forms, connected to a DTC in the CA office, controlled by the CA
>  system. Are there any ways of having two MPE/iX machines send data to the
>  same DTC?

One way to do this, if I understand your architecture correctly, is to have
the MD HP3000 ftp a copy of the desired print files to a specific, normally
empty group and account on the CA HP3000. It's on this second HP3000 that a
constantly running job would periodically wake up and check this "watched"
group for any new files. If it finds them, it would then read the file and
print it to the CA DTC-connected printer. In this manner, the printer would
be actually be driven from the CA machine, no differently than things are
done now. It would require no reconfiguration of anything on your network nor
the purchase of any new hardware.

To make this work, a small program to read the files in the "watched" group
and print them to the desired printer would have to be written, but if this
program were written in BASIC/V (which is now free for the asking), it would
be less than ten lines worth of code and very easy to create.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *