My official PC Link software from Radio Shack hasn't arrived yet; meanwhile
I found a communication program called zoomcom and tried transferring the
notebook contents to my desktop PC. The file is full of strange bytes that I
think must be GEOS overhead. Do Zoomers deal with any straightforward ASCII
files? When I get the link software from Radio Shack, does it do something
intelligent with the funny file format? (E.g. provide PC apps mirroring the
Zoomer apps, that might allow me to import and export ASCII files.) Will I
need to install GEOS on my desktop PC to have this all make sense?
Radio Shack's manual is pretty sparse for technical data. Are there any
books on Zoomers? There seem to be plenty of books on Newtons.
I'd really love a deferred recognizer, which wasn't designed into the
Zoomer's original software. Has anybody written a deferred recognizer? Is it
possible to do so?
For that matter, how actively are people writing Zoomer apps? (Scale of zero
to ten: zero = no activity at all, ten = Microsoft reassigning Chicago team
to create Zoomer spreadsheet)
It looks like the infrared port does exactly what the serial port does. Is
this true? It seems likely because the Radio Shack guy mentioned that some
day, they'd sell an IR port that hooks up to the PC's serial port. Has
anybody tried building such an IR port? I would like to build such a thing
if it's practical. Even if you've done an experiment or two that gives a
vague suggestion of how such a thing would work, I'd appreciate hearing
about it.
Really dumb question: Suppose I start tinkering with one of the magical
start-up files, and I completely lock up the machine and everything is
stuck. If I do the hard reset, I know I'll lose all my data, but will it
reliably set the thing up to be usable again? I.e., is there enough smarts
on the 4 megabytes of ROM to reconstruct a usable environment after a really
bad crash?
Thanks very much,
Will Ware <wware@world.std.com>