Late yesterday, Wirt wrote:

> Enough fibre optic cable is being laid
> around the world at the moment that there is no serious talk of eliminating
> long-distance phone charges in the next few years.

I assume from the context this is "there is NOW serious talk."

But would these savings really be passed along to consumers??

> There are no
> technical barriers to putting an HP3000 server anywhere in the world now.
> All we're waiting for now is a few more lanes to be added to the
> informational superhighway to make this a reality.
>
> And for us to finish QCTerm.

What?  Software can be *finished* ?!  The devil you say! ;)


As an aside (feel free to hit "delete" now), I'm beginning to understand
how things like background images can "easily" be created via QCTerm.

I recently purchased REALbasic for the Mac.  This is an object-oriented
(yeah, yeah) environment that reminds me a bit of RPG and an old app from
Michael A. Casteel (Vimage?  I think it was V-something) in that there was
some "fixed logic" behind the scenes.  In REALbasic, a window can have
a background image simply by setting the appropriate "property" for the
window.

Anyway, after a week of reading the manuals and working through a brief
tutorial, last night I made enough progress on my first "real" app that
it's actually workable as is -- and I *started* on it only last night!

This may not seem like much to those who haven't tried GUI development,
but for anyone who has tried doing this stuff with raw C (as I have on
three occasions in the past), it was darned amazing.  Working menus,
working window refresh, working list box, working push buttons, etc.

(I needed a tool that would list the sounds embedded in an app.
I wanted to preview the sounds by double-clicking on one or more,
and I needed to save selected sounds in their native stand-alone
format.  To get all of that working -- as a standalone GUI app --
in a single evening just blows my mind.  Welcome to the 90's, eh? ;)

But wait, there's more!  While the standard version currently generates
native Mac apps, the "pro" version can generate native Windows apps
as well (though that feature doesn't work well yet), and Java (of course)
byte-code generation is on its way.


My hat's off to you, Wirt.  "BASIC" or no, this rapid development
stuff is amazing!  To leverage it for the benefit of the HP 3000
community must be that much sweeter.

--Glenn (who apologizes profusely to "digest" readers trying to
         skip over most of this)