[Coco] strange descriptors? was Re: Telnetting from a window

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Dec 6, 2014 2:02 AM, "Willard Goosey" <goosey at virgo.sdc.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 09:34:17PM -0600, Bill Nobel wrote:
> > I just had a look at my boot/system map and I am pretty close to you
Gene, here is my mdir:
> >
> >    Module Directory at 21:20:21
> [...]
> > Z1          Z2          Z3          Z4
>
> What are these descriptors for, please?
>
> Willard

As others have mentioned,  these are for remote OS9 windows.. essentially
they work like standard /w devices except the window is on the DW server
instead of the Coco.   In function they are currently just the same as the
/N descriptors (z1 is n17, z2 is n18, etc except that the spec says there
is no n17).  Initially I was just using the regular /N devices as windows
but in order to support things like mouse input events there has to be some
coco side support in the module and adding that to the
/N driver would have been weird.  Also the /N server side already provides
several APIs (Hayes AT commands, dw commands, ui commands, networking
commands) and it was getting crowded and weird too.

It is completely safe to remove these if you don't use remote windows,  and
you can have any number of them between 1 and 15 just like with /Ns.   One
difference is that there is no pseudo device to just allocate a free
channel like there is with "/N".  This is to match the way /W devices work.