Overview: 6.9 System Services: Communications

Communications is becoming an increasingly important area of system services. GEOS provides programs with a number of means of communication, whether communicating with peripheral devices, other computers, or with another GEOS program.

IACP, the Inter-Application Communication Protocol provides a way to send highly-structured messages between applications. It is quite versatile, but not simple.
The PCCom library allows a GEOS device to exchange data and files with another device over a serial link. The other device must also have access to PCCom--as of this writing, this means that the device must be running either DOS or GEOS.
Streams are like one-way pipes that allow a thread to send data to or receive data from another thread or I/O port. Typically, streams are used when dealing with serial or parallel ports; however, they may also be used for communication between two threads. GEOS has a Stream Driver that manages input to and output from streams. Additionally, a Parallel Driver manages output to a parallel port, and a Serial Driver manages input from and output to a serial port.
The Socket library, not present on all GEOS systems, provides a socket communication API--an API analogous to WinSock or Unix sockets. It provides a simple interface for communicating between machines or between programs running on the same machine.

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