Several people have written me privately with messages such as this when they
tried to demonstrate the QCTerm forms mode to themselves:

> I expected something different than this:
>  ===================================================================
>  HP32101B.00.26(4WD)  BASIC  (C)HEWLETT-PACKARD CO 1979
>  >run formdem2
>  FORMDEM2
>  k0F
>  /background {fill &h000000&}
>  kC
>  k0F
>  *********************************************************
>  *                    CONFIG_OPEN
>  *********************************************************
>  /mode {form cell}
>  /box {0 0 800 2000 fill &he0f0ff& penwidth 0}
>  /box {0 0 120 2000 fill &ha08080& penwidth 0}
>  /font {face Times color &he0e0e0& size 28}
>  /text {116 100 rj Alden}
>  /text {116 120 rj Research}
>  /text {116 140 rj Inc.}

If you're seeing this script, it almost certainly means that you're using a
terminal emulator other than QCTerm. When QCTerm sees this script, QCTerm
will display a form. All other emulators, because they don't have QCTerm's
forms method in them, will merely show the script.

You may not know, but VPLUS forms are not really on the HP3000. Rather,
they're also in the HP terminal itself. The host merely transmits the
specifications (the script) for a form to the terminal, but the form itself
-- and its possible behaviors -- were defined in the terminal's
specifications in the early 1970's. VPLUS is a program that was written to
use those capabilities.

The same is true of QCTerm's new forms mode. It too is in the terminal
emulator, and obviously at the moment QCTerm is the only emulator to have
this new and still developing capability. All terminal- or web-based forms
work in approximately in the same manner. VPLUS at its core isn't all that
much different from web-based forms, which in turn are no different than most
any other forms method. But at the core of the new forms design that we're
putting into QCTerm lies the intention to be more flexible, more efficient,
easier to program against, tied less to a specific platform and prettier than
anything you might have seen before. Most importantly, the intention is to
fool the user into believing that the application he or she is using is in
the PC at their feet, rather than possibly on the other side of the world,
connected through the internet.

Don't take the form that you see in the current demonstration to be
indicative of what's yet to come. It's simply a test and is still in a very
primitive state. The most important moral from this one form is that it was
created wholly automatically from its original FORMSPEC definition. There are
353 such forms in NMMGR alone. The new process that Frank Smith is working on
will allow someone to convert all of the forms in a package into the new
structure in just an instant, while allowing you the capacity to specify
things such as the background colors, the font styles, placement of corporate
logos, etc. These latter attributes are merely a matter of the template that
is constructed as you choose. Indeed, it will be wholly possible to put an
image of your corporate campus up as a background image, behind the form, if
you wished. Once the template has been specified, the VPLUS-to-QCTerm forms
conversion process just rips through the forms, building one file for each
new form.

Clearly VPLUS-converted forms will use only a subset of the new forms
capability that's coming. Items such as check boxes and pull-down menus never
existed in VPLUS, thus they won't show up in the converted forms. But perhaps
even more important, forms that are newly user-specified can not only use all
of these capabilities, the forms can also be any size you wish. If you
specify the background to be larger than the screen size, the form will
simply scroll either horizontally or vertically as you move the cursor along.

Wirt Atmar








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