I made a couple stabs at it.  The first disconnected by itself after a couple
minutes, the second never finished after 15 minutes (no feedback on the download
anymore).  When I tried to 'send break', it told me it was busy, and then closed
down the program, but a process was still visible in Task Manager.

I'm on a cable modem at my end.



Wirt Atmar wrote:

> During my spare time over the last several days, I've put together a more
> fully multimedia presentation using QCTerm. The talk that I've prepared as a
> first trial at putting multimedia on our HP3000 is a recap of the talk that I
> gave at last year's HPWorld in San Francisco.
>
> Over the last few months, I've grown more enthusiastic about the
> possibilities of us using QCTerm to provide not only a standard terminal
> emulator and a much enhanced GUI forms interface, but also as an educational
> mechanism. I spend probably 30% of my day -- virtually every day -- teaching
> people how to use our products over the phone, at one or two hour stretches
> at a time. QCTerm, with a very few slight modifications, offers us the
> possibility of my recording a lot of this material and letting people watch
> it as often as they want, whenever they want, from wherever they find
> convenient. Doing that will not only relieve some of my burden (which I truly
> don't mind all that much), but more importantly, it will actually increase
> the number of people that I can talk to at any one time and increase our
> customers capacity to watch this material at their convenience. It's become
> clear of late that Ive personally become a limiting factor in our own success.
>
> The thing I'd like to show you now is simply a first stab at at this.
> Hopefully, what you see here will look quite primitive in a few months. To
> see (and now hear) the San Francisco talk, telnet into our 918DX
> (209.181.113.217) and sign on as:
>
>       yourname,demo.qcterm
>
> Then type "b" for BASIC, and then type:
>
>       >run slides
>
> Let me warn you at the outset that in the current design of QCTerm, all of
> the sound and graphics files are downloaded before QCTerm begins to play the
> program. Most normally, that's the way that you would want to do it, but in
> this case, there are 3MB of files to download -- and the 918 only has a 56K
> frame relay circuit attached to it, so it will take about 7-9 minutes for
> these files to download.
>
> In a soon-to-be-released version of QCTerm, you'll only have to wait for the
> first sound or image files to download; everything after that will download
> silently in the background, as you watch the program. I estimate that for
> this specific talk, using the next version of QCTerm, your initial wait time
> will be cut to 23 seconds.
>
> All of this downloaded material is being cached in the c:\aics\cache folder
> on your PC, thus if you watch this talk again, you'll find that the talk will
> run instantly. If you want to purge all of this material after you watch,
> simply purge the cache folder (it will rebuild itself automatically).
>
> Let me explain how I put this talk together.
>
> I put all the slides that you will together using nothing more elaborate than
> EDIT/3000. There are 34 slides in the talk, labeled SLIDE1 to SLIDE34. I
> actually did this half a year ago, just a few days before HPWorld.
>
> A few days ago, on Sunday evening, I recorded 32 voice snippets (two of the
> slides have no sound) using the Sound Recorder that comes with every version
> of MS Windows. Once you get the hang of using this very easy-to-use program,
> it works surprisingly nicely. The sound is compressed 10:1 during the
> recording using GSM encoding (an algorithm that was invented in Europe for
> European cell phone usage). Of all of the codecs that I have tried, GSM
> provides the highest quality sound at the highest level compression; on a 56K
> link, the sound files arrive in one-third the time they take to play. Better
> yet, the GSM codec has been in Windows since the earliest versions of Win95.
>
> Each snippet of sound is attached to its respective slide. This is a very
> easy way for an amateur to create a sound track. Doing one slide at a time is
> a thousand times easier than having to speak for the entire 20 minute run of
> the talk.
>
> You'll notice that I stumble a bit here and there. If the first take was
> anywhere near to acceptable, I just left it. It seemed like more of a natural
> talk to me that way -- and no one would ever mistake me for a highly
> polished, silver-tongued snake oil salesman :-).
>
> Although it may not look like it, QCTerm is still operating as a terminal --
> and it's still just as interactive. If you want to quit the talk, type "X",
> followed by a carriage return. If you want to go to a particular slide, type
> "16" (or whatever slide number you want), followed by a CR.
>
> When the program exits, you will be in the SLIDES program. You can at that
> point, if you wish, type "LIST" to see the code that's driving the slides.
> The advancement of the slides is coming from the HP3000, using a timed-read.
> The SLIDES program is reading each one of the flat-file slides, one at a
> time, and presenting them to the QCTerm display, and waiting for either the
> timed read to time-out or for you to type something.
>
> If you wish to see what constitutes the slides, exit BASIC and type "EDITOR"
> to get into EDIT/3000, and then type:
>
>       /t slide16
>
> or whatever slide you wish to see.
>
> All of this code is completely open. There are no passwords or firewalls. And
> none of the code is protected in any way. Should you accidentally modify the
> code, it isn't a catastrophe. We have backups. Just let me know that you
> think it might a little fouled.
>
> Wirt Atmar