Dorio news

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Newsgroups: comp.terminals
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Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Westford, MA
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            <mgbuo4INN3q0@news.bbn.com>
Date: 8 Dec 1993 23:27:29 GMT
From: Bill Hedberg <hedberg@hannah.enet.dec.com> 
Subject: Re: Wanted: Good ASCII terminal

pdsmith@bbn.com (Peter D. Smith) writes:
>
> What is it with Dorio terminals?  They say they're made by DEC - are
> they a subsidiary of DEC?  An independant company?  Is the Dorio some
> sort of repackaged VT420?

  From the marketing literature...

  The short story is, that "Dorio" is a new "brand name" (marketing
  speak) for this terminal.  The VT510 and the Dorio were announced in
  Sept '93. The VT510 is for traditional Digital customers and the
  Dorio is for the "ASCII" terminal world.  There are some h/w and s/w
  differences between VT510 and Dorio, but they are very similar
  products. 

  The Dorio is:

   - Built by Digital Equipment Corporation.

   - A new "brand name" (marketing speak).

   - It is an "ANSI/ASCII" terminal.
       ie. it has traditional Digital ANSI standard terminal modes
        VT320, VT220, VT100, VT52
       and (new for Digital) ASCII terminal emulations:
        WYSE 60, PCTerm, WYSE 50, WYSE 150/120,
        Televideo 950, 925, 910+, ADDS A2 and SCO Console.

   - It was designed to replace existing terminals found in
       UNIX, Pick, multiuser DOS, etc. "ASCII" environments.

   - Keyboard and character set support for 27 languages.

   - It is *not* a repackaged VT420 (Dorio is new hardware).

   - It has new features specifically for VARs like

      . A Power Up screen banner (advertise your name here)
      . A completely reprogrammable keyboard (onboard Define Key Editor)
          (Set-Up or Num Lock key can be disabled to prevent user error,
           any key can be a Function key)
      . Local user functions: Clock/Calculator
      . Local Program/debug functions: Show character sets, Show control chars
      . Snap-in ROM cartridge for bug fixes and custom code

   - SCO Console mode maps to the "ansi" terminfo found on SCO UNIX,
     but it works with other UNIX also.

VT is a registered trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation
WYSE is a registered trademark of WYSE Technologies, etc...

> Inquiring minds want to know!

  Call 1-800-BY-DORIO (1-800-293-6746) for info.


	- Bill

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Newsgroups: comp.terminals
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From: hedberg@hannah.enet.dec.com (Bill Hedberg)
Subject: Re: INFO WANTED: The "Un-terminal"
Date: 6 MAR 1995 10:07:28

	The "Un-terminal" is marketed by Advance Micro Research,
San Jose, CA (408-456-9430).  UnTerminal product literature describes it
as a system box into which is plugged a VGA monitor, PC keyboard and mouse.
The system box connected to a driver card in the PC using a serial wire.
It appears that the driver card mimics a set of VGA registers and
communicates with the "terminal" system box using a proprietary protocol.
Compressed bitmap data is sent to the to update the display.  Drivers
available for SCO XENIX, UNIX, Open Desk Top, SunSoft-Interactive,
UNIXWARE, IGC-VM/386, Microbase-VirtuOS, TSL-PCMOS.

	The Digital VT525 or Dorio25 color text terminal also uses a
system box design (aka "pizza box").  It accepts an SVGA color monitor
and a PC keyboard.  It communicates with the host using standard RS232.

It has standard ANSI/ASCII text terminal emulations.

ANSI emulations:  VT525, VT420, VT320, VT220, VT100, PCTerm

ASCII emulations: Wyse 325, 160/60, PCTerm, 50/50+, 120/150
                  Televideo TVI 950, 925, 910+, ADDS A2, DEC VT52,
                  SCO Console (like ANSI.SYS or UNIX terminal emulation)

Built-in features: Calculator and Clock

	We now have EZ-SetUp cartridges for VT500 terminals.  SetUp data
is stored in a plug-in cartridge so that it can be copied to other VT500
family terminals, reducing effort to manage groups of VT500 terminals.

For information on Digital terminal products, contact marketing manager:
  Bjorn Waenerlund (Waenerlund@mro.mts.dec.com)

 [2004: email address is long stale, alas]

..............................................................................
Bill Hedberg Digital Equipment Corp. Video Architecture Engineering
http://www.digital.com               ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/termcaps


 [ 2004: after all this time, the anonymous-FTP site "gatekeeper.dec.com"
   is now canonically called "gatekeeper.research.compaq.com".
   It no longer appears to have the DEC termcap files, but it does offer
   some GNU documentation for *using* termcap:

   ftp://gatekeeper.research.compaq.com/pub/GNU/Manuals/termcap-1.3/text/termcap.txt
 ]

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Newsgroups: comp.terminals,comp.periphs.printers,comp.os.linux.development.apps
References: <80200dd9.0402071013.4a541148@posting.google.com>
Message-ID: <rshu_20040216_205959@stratagy.com>
Organization: The Late, Great Stratagy Users Group
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:59:59 -0500
From: Richard S. Shuford <shuford@list.stratagy.REM0VE-THlS-PART.com>
Subject: Re: Send ESC sequences to printer attached to terminal

Igor Bujna <kocour_easy*post.cz> wrote:
|
| I have Oki 3390 printer attached to terminal "Dario 10-vgb10".
| I want send ESC-sequences to printer for bar-codes printing.
| I found out that i can use "mc5p" sequences for printing some bytes
| to given printer.  I don't find this sequences on my linux system.
|
| When I write to printer given ESC-sequences for printing bar-codes
| via "Open printer sequence-mc5" and "Close printer sequence-mc4"
| data didn't reach printer in right format.  It prints only bar-code
| numbers instead of bar-code+bar-code numbers.


Igor:

I think you must mean a "Dorio" terminal, not "Dario".  The Dorio
brand was first applied in 1993 by Digital Equipment Corporation to
Value-Added Reseller versions of its VT510 character-cell terminal.
A few years later, DEC sold off its entire video-terminal business
to Boundless Technologies.  The characteristics of the Dorio VGB-10
are still [as of 2004-02-16] noted on the Boundless anonymous-FTP site:

    ftp://ftp.boundless.com/pub/text/dec/specs/dor10.txt
 
Now, as to your programming problem.  Think of this proverb:

    "There are more modes of failure than modes of success."

Lots of things could be going wrong.  The technology you want is
spread out through operating-system libraries, OS databases, your
application software, the firmware of the Dorio terminal, and the
firmware and setup of the attached printer.

I have no experience with the particular Oki printer model (3390) you
say you have.  However, to produce bar codes, many printer types
use a special bar-code font, with a separate font for each different
type of bar code (UPC-A, Code-39, etc.)  You should read the technical
documentation for this Oki 3390 printer to find out what it needs.
You might need to have your application software explicitly download   
a barcode font to the printer before beginning other operations.

  [brief pause for web search]
 
I found the following web page about an Oki Microline 3391 printer,
which is probably a successor to the 3390...

    http://www.shopoki.co.uk/datasheet/ml3391_spec.htm
 
..and the page describes a 24-pin dot-matrix unit equipped with a  
number of built-in barcode fonts (Code 39, UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN 8, EAN 13,
Interleaved 2 of 5, ZIP, and Code 128). So, if the 3390 also had these,
perhaps the solution involves invoking the proper font before sending
the digits. (And switching the font back afterwards.)  Here again, you
must read the documentation to find out what is required.

As to the precise issues you mention above:  the "mc5p" capability is
the "terminfo" way of saying

    "turn the printer on, to print a specified number of bytes"   

where the number of bytes/octets can be up to 256.  (In "termcap"
the "pO" capability is the equivalent.)  Typically, such capabilities
are invoked programmatically via library-function calls to "curses"
or "ncurses" entry points.

The Linux Documentation Project provides information on "Terminfo
and Termcap" in several places, among which is:

    http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Text-Terminal-HOWTO-15.html

You should check to make certain that several things are true:   

  *  that your Dorio terminal actually is able to perform the
     "mc5p" function of passing a counted number of bytes to
     an attached printer

  *  that your TERM environment variable is properly set

  *  that your Linux machine contains a "terminfo" database
     entry which corresponds to the TERM variable you are setting
     (or has a termcap entry to which the library will fall back)
  
  *  that this corresponding terminfo-database entry contains
     a functional control sequence that actually causes the
     "turn the printer on, to print a specified number of bytes"
     functionality to happen
    
Some "termcap" style advice appearing here...

    http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/termcap/termcap_43.html

..contains a sentence of some relevance:

    Most terminals with printers do not support all of `ps',
    `po' and `pO'; any one or two of them may be supported.

The DEC-style terminals with which I am familiar implement only
the non-parameterized capabilities "mc5" and "mc4", like this:
    
    TERMINFO   TERMCAP     CONTROL
    CAPABILITY CAPABILITY  SEQUENCE     MEANING
    ---------- ----------  ---------    ---------------------------  
      mc5        po        ESC [ 5 i    Printer-Controller Mode On 
      mc4        pf        ESC [ 4 i    Printer-Controller Mode Off

While it is possible that the Dorio VBG-10 is able to do what
"mc5p" asks it to do, it may not, so you may have to fall back to
using mc5 and mc4.   You can check the documentation for the VBG-10
or for whatever equivalent model Boundless is currently supporting.

There is also a possible behavioral surprise lurking in all this:
if the "mc5p" command is properly implemented in the curses library
and in the terminal, it has the following property: while 'mc5p' is
in effect, "all text, including 'mc4', is transparently passed to
the printer."  (Which you probably don't want.)

There are numerous other resources about related issues which you
can find, or find pointers to, from web pages I keep at:
  
    http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal_index.html

A wonderfully helpful book on all such topics is this:
 
    "termcap and terminfo"
    by John Strang, Linda Mui and Tim O'Reilly
    3rd Edition April 1988  
    270 pages, ISBN: 0-937175-22-6, $29.95 U.S.
    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/term/
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0937175226
    
 ...RSS


-- 
K.L. says to try http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/herb/r.php
which, however, contains no caffeine.

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Message-ID: <m2k8qszpn7.fsf@haruchai.rnet.com>
References: <m2pv0mz8ya.fsf@haruchai.rnet.com>
Organization: Extreme Systems Consulting
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:43:11 -0500 (CDT)
From: Aaron Baugher <abaugher@rnet.com>
Subject: Re: Dorio VGB10 Command Keys


| Can anyone tell me the command key(s) to change the
| configuration on a Dorio VGB10?  I've tried every
| combination of ALT- CTRL- and such that I can think of.
| ...
| Everything I can find assumes that I can hit a SET-UP key to
| configure the thing, but it just has a PS/2 keyboard hooked
| to it, so no special keys.  My quest continues...

> Worth a try: if this is what is called an "EPC" keyboard,
> try pressing the Control and Scroll-Lock keys simultaneously.
> That might get you into and out of Setup.

That was close; it turned out to be the ALT and Print Screen
(or SysRq) keys simultaneously.  I thought I'd tried that
already, but apparently I'd missed it.

Thanks,
Aaron
-- 
Aaron Baugher - <abaugher@rnet.com> - Quincy, IL, USA
Extreme Systems Consulting - http://haruchai.rnet.com/esc/
CGI, Perl, Java, and Linux/Unix Administration


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