[Oberon] Re: Oberon as Fax Terminal

[easlab at absamail.co.za]

Patrick H. wrote:-
> Has anybody successfully used
> Oberon(any version)/NativeOberon/Bluebottle
> as a fax terminal and is willing to share his experience ?

One reason for me previously raising the problem of
transfering small files from one machine to another,
with diskettes becoming less reliable due to mechanical
limitations and NO's fragile inabillity to recover from a
bad fd0-read [without M$ing/rebooting], was exactly the
need to fax [from linux] my texts which are all developed
and kept on a NO-box.
It's very usefull to be able to fax to people [who you find
haven't got, or like often here in S. Africa have 'got the 
internet', but don't know how to use it], your on-file text 
[from your NO project's directory/partition].

I prefer not to view it as a fax terminal.
It's perhaps better to see fax-Tx & fax-Rx as 2 independant
facilities ?   You can use the advantage of being a bus-passenger, 
without ever being a bus-driver ?

The reason why I have [& may] never done fax-Rx is because
you would have to have a dedicated machine, as you normally
can't know when a fax may arrive. [As a 'passenger' you can
use the bus/facility when it suits you ?]
----------

But I want to [again] leaverage this topic to more general
considerations - which I've raised before.

* fax utilities are available, mature, work-well from 
GNU/linux.

* I don't know of any reason why the existing GNU work
should not be used and acknowledged to port an Oberon
version ?

* Apparently many of NO's 'utilities ' originate from student
projects, which by definition must be individual efforts ?
And the idea of projects necessarily being individual creations, 
has carried over into an inappropriate [for collaborative
development] attitude of NO individual/private efforts.

*  If a general acceptance of porting linux/GNU utilities
to NO [ & descendants] is adopted, we would want to 
develop/evolve a frame-work/tool-chain for this.
Perhaps starting with the naive yet very effective/proven
NO concept of *.Tool [eg. a 'dictionary' of examples to
help translate C-constructs to oberon-syntax, for those
who don't want to become fluent in C (this could be eg.
extended to cater for many other languages besides 'C'.
That's the concept of leaveraging: extending and squeezing
as much value out of your efforts ? )].  Consider eg. the 
'hi-liteing' editors eg. vim which are great tools for all 
the language-syntaxes which they serve.
BTW such a 'dictionary' of examples could perhaps be
evolved heuristically "towards" a syntax-directed-editor
which I've previously raised.  A tool doesn't need to be
fully-automagic to be of use/value - like NO still doesn't
has a one-click 'backup partition X' ?

In summary, student projects must be private and
completeable, whereas collaborative projects are a 
never-ending process and require a different approach.
-------

Related to fax facilities, I'd like also mobile phone utils.
Like when you have no access to a working telco-line and
need to send/receive urgent emails.
I've previously stored descriptions of howTOdo under linux;
and mulinux [a single fd0 version which I also use, mentions
'Nokia virtual modem']. And now I've just found:
http://www.gnokii.org/ = Open source tools for your mobile phone.

So do any readers know about [first hand experience with] email
[not G3] via mobile phone ?

One problem is that this technology is moving so fast, that it would
be difficult to get a payback for any work ?


== Chris Glur.