Help-Needed by a Brit

[aristocrat]

I am an electrical engineer and I work with PLC's . But I know little about Qbasic. Back in the late 80's one of my machines had attached to it a text messager for faults , and if you needed to change the message I remember I had to load either GWBasic
or QBasic, can't remember which! Then you loaded a little program called M&W ( that was the name/make of the text messager )
it had a two wire serial connection send/receive and no hand shaking, I remember 'cos I made the lead.it used simple commands like
P for programming a message, V for verifying,fine for finishing etc. Or something like that.This is where you might be able to help me.
I have just moved Jobs. And lo and behold a lot of the machines Have M&W text messagers on . None of them work but most of them just have "Flat memory Batteries". Can you suggest some things I could try? I need to talk though com port 1, at 300 baud,I think the M&W has some on board program cos its epromed.

 

[Buff1]

Look through the help for Qbasic (especially open Com)
It shows how to open a com port including using baud rate.

As for using it to control devices, there have been some
examples of that but I haven't dealt with it. Check around
on the qbasic sites and ask on other qbasic boards (there's still quite a few around).