Today I was invited to help a company deal with the Y2K. What I saw there
basically brought me to my knees.
They have a monstrous box, about 6x10x8 feet that is too old to be a
mainframe. The owner of the company said it is about 20 years old. Considering
that I am 19 you might figure out how I felt. So the deal is, the system
of some unknown name has only one terminal and a printer. It has no
storage devices whatsoever yet it contains inventory type data that has
been entered into it over the period of the past 20 years. The box hasn't been
shut down since it was turned on before I was born so I would not want to
take a risk of checking if it is Y2K compliant by rebooting it somehow.
What I want to do on the other hand, is to extract all the data that is
in it via the printer port. Considering that it prints to a dot matrix
printer it should be possible to get that data in some wird sequence of
ASCII characters and hopefully decode the thread and put it into a nice
SQL database. The printout looks like a easy to understand sequence of
lines that seem to be separated into columns by <tab>. That is as far as
I have gotten today.
My question. Is there a way I could capture the output that goes to the
printer with a help of a Linux box? If so, what would be the best set up?
I am not sure what kind of a port/protocol it uses but I have a feeling
it is a standard Cetronics one. Any, even minor, assistance would be great.
Behold the power of Linux :-)
Denis Voitenko
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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