Subj: Using an actual VT100 connected to a PC

[John Schweppe]

Hello Mr. Dickey, 
 
My name is John Schweppe.  I am a software developer at Citibank.  We are 
currently looking for a text browser solution for one of our projects.  We 
need to find a Win32 (NT 4.0) text browser who's user interface is a VT100 
connected via RS232 to a PC. 
 
 
 
Background 
================================ 
Citibank's ATMs (client terminal) started out as a UNIX based box, close to 
20 years ago.  The system and administrative functions of the ATM were 
handled by a VT100 to monitor operational status, view transaction journals, 
perform proofing and other functions.  In the mid 90s, Citibank migrated 
their ATMs to the NT platform.  The VT100 interface still needed to be 
supported to perform these operations. 
 
Software was written on the NT platform to communicate with the VT100 (via 
RS232 serial communications) to provide the same capability as was found on 
the UNIX based ATM. 
 
Citibank is currently revising their user interface to include an HTML 
browser presentation to the customer display.  The browser based approach 
seems to make sense for the sys admin user interface as well.  However, the 
consumer bank may not want to go through the expense to get rid of all their 
VT100 terminals in lieu of a graphical browser platform (e.g. a PC). 
 
The approach is to use the existing physical interface (VT100 over RS232). 
The thought is to adapt the Lynx text browser software to send the text 
characters via RS232 to the VT100 instead of to NT's console window. 
 
 
Current LYNX Observations 
==================================== 
I downloaded the source and started looking through it.  It appears that the 
effort to modify the lynx browser to accomplish the task mentioned above may 
be pretty involved.  In addition, our development unit uses Microsoft Visual 
C++ as our development platform and would necessitate the project to built 
under this compiler.  It appears that porting Lynx to MSVC++ has not been 
successful (after reading various lynx-dev email). 
 
Request 
==================================== 
The effort to implement this functionality could be relatively trivial, 
however, our Citibank developers are being kept quite busy with other 
development tasks at hand. 
 
It was suggested that the effort could be done outside Citibank.  If you or 
anyone you know may be interested in providing this effort, I would be 
interested in hearing from you. 
 
 
My email addresses are: 
     [[work]] address@hidden 
     [[home]] address@hidden 
 
I look forward to a response. 
 
Regards, 
John Schweppe 
eCiti LA 
 


-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
address@hidden
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey