I've been receiving e-mails with increasing frequency asking something like:
"It's been six months since you put up a new version of QCTerm on your
website. Is it dead? Are you planning on making any future enchancements to
the product?"

Let me say that QCTerm is definitely not dead. In fact, it's just because of
the opposite that we haven't put up a new release lately. We've completely
rewritten QCTerm from top to bottom to incorporate a whole raft of new
features that we're racing to try to get ready for the Philadelphia HPWorld
show. It now looks like we're going to make it with a little bit of time to
spare and we will probably release a new version in early September.

You won't notice much difference in QCTerm if you use it only as a terminal
emulator. As you might expect, the terminal's behavior is relatively static
and won't change much from now on. We have just a few things that remain to
be added. As one person recently wrote us, "if you could have it support file
xfer, you'd rule the world!" While ruling the world is a grand and noble
ideal (if you're the ruler), that has to be put off for a little while. File
transfer will come, but it remains towards the bottom of our to-do list.
Finishing the first pass as the van Gogh forms mode is at the top.

It's clear that we could write QCTerm to compete head on with a browser-like
interface, albeit using a different syntax, but there's no reason for us to
do that. Browsers already exist and we'd be adding no value at all to anyone
if we were to do that. Indeed, we'd just be wasting our time and a great deal
of money.

Instead, what we're attempting to do is provide a very simple (with an
emphasis on simple) -- but very attractive interface -- so that anyone can
write and develop applications on the HP3000, using any language that they
feel comfortable with, and yet hopefully so confuse the end-user that he or
she couldn't tell that they were running an application on an HP3000 three
thousand miles away or on a PC on their desk.

What's taking so long is that we don't have a road map to govern this current
work. We're just feeling our way along, creating interfaces, seeing how we
like them, and unfortunately discarding more than one major attempt. But the
good news is that the interface design keeps getting simpler, and that's
something that I very much want in the final version.

And the second piece of good news is, as always, all of this will be free for
you to use, as much or as often as you wish, if you care to do so.

Wirt Atmar