Re: Text-based OPAC?

[Steve Sowder <sowder at andrews dot edu>]

We used to do this several years ago (at least five).

We took an older PC and made it "stupid". (That's enough from the Mac 
crowd.)

We took out the hard drive, created a floppy disk with enough to boot the 
DOS system and start up QVT/Term. When all checked out and was working we 
turned the floppy drive so that it was entirely internal (so the floppy 
disk wouldn't walk off) and then covered the opening with a blank faceplate 
to keep little fingers out of the case.

I don't recall the details of the boot but it was a very basic system. IP 
address was hardcoded (maybe hardwired) on the NIC.

We ran several of these for a couple of years and they worked fine for us.
  

Steve Sowder
sowder at andrews dot edu



On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, David Brennan wrote:

> Good morning-
> 
> In our library, we have several OPACs that are in very remote locations and are unsupervised for long periods. When they were as fully capable as our other OPACs, there were problems with misuse.
> What we have done at this point is to force them to use the text-based catalog. However, this still requires a PC with Windows, and up until now, we've just absorbed these in our lease cycle. It seems a waste to me to make a 2.4GHz PC into a dumb terminal, so in order to cut a few PCs from our next lease cycle, I'm investigating replacing these with either extremely ancient PCs running DOS and a telnet client or a dedicated dumb terminal.
> As for the PC option, I've gotten one to boot and get an IP address, but haven't yet figured out how I'll telnet into III - I'm a bit rusty at messing with all of the configurations, packet drivers and the like. I have no idea if there is a dumb terminal which is capable of DHCP and telnet - we have a few left from our old DRA system, but they run over the proprietary cabling from 10 years ago - no luck there.
> Has anyone had experience with this type of setup?
> Thanks,
> 
> David
> 
> ============================
> David Brennan, MLS
> Electronic Services Librarian
> Clifford E. Barbour Library
> Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
> 616 N. Highland Ave.
> Pittsburgh, PA 15206
> 412-441-3304 x2256
> 412-362-2329 (FAX)
> dbrennan at pts dot edu
> http://www.barbourlibrary.org
> ============================
> Ignorance must certainly be bliss or there wouldn't be so many people so resolutely pursuing it.
> ============================
> 
> 
> 
> 
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