RipServer
A server for graphical RIPscrip terminals.
Borland C, RIPscrip, RIPterm · two machines and a null modem
Author’s notes
Amir Husain · software I wrote
RIPscrip was a way of putting graphics on a bulletin board without sending pictures. The board sent drawing commands as text, a few hundred bytes for a whole screen, and a terminal such as RIPterm drew them at the caller's end, buttons included. Clicking a button sent a word back up the line.
RipServer is my end of that exchange. It reads a list of pages, and for each page the words a caller may send and the page each word leads to. When a caller arrives it sends the first page, then waits for a word and answers with the page linked to it. The whole server is a page table and a loop.
Reading the demonstration
The caller’s terminal draws the interface from commands sent by the server. Clicking a button sends a response back to select the next page.
About this recording and recovery
The copy in the archive read its commands from standard input behind a Linux login. The one recorded here talks to COM1 instead, so RIPterm can dial it over a null modem, and the pages it serves were drawn for this recording in the format the program expects.
Archive record
- Author
- Amir Husain
- Date
- c. 1996
- Environment
- Borland C, RIPscrip, RIPterm · two machines and a null modem
- Reference
- ATX-SW-RIPSERVER
The software archive preserves dates, implementation notes, and surviving source material. Contact the museum to explore the program’s documentation.