Yes, quite exiting!
If all else fails, you could always scan the printouts & use OCR to
re-create the data.
On Fri, 02 Jul 1999 19:35:25 -0400 (EDT), Denis Voitenko wrote:
>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
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>
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Casey Bralla
Chief Nerd In Residence
The NerdWorld Organisation
http://www.NerdWorld.org
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