The time has come in the development cycle of QCTerm to seriously begin
thinking about how file transfer capabilities should be implemented. Any
thoughts or opinions that you might wish to offer would be greatly
appreciated.

At the moment, three different tacks can be imagined. They are:

1. Use a QCTerm-specific file transfer protocol

To do this, an HP3000-resident program, much like WRQ's PCLINK, Tymlabs
TYMLINK, etc., would have to be written. This is a bit of work, but it is by
no means a killer project. Further, it could have several beneficial
attributes. Rene Woc of Adager mentioned a few months ago a feature that they
would really like to see in a file transfer program would be checkpoint
recovery (i.e., if a file is interrupted during transfer, when transfer
resumes, the file begins again at the point of interruption, not at the
beginning of the file). This would be particularly useful for large files.

The primary disadvantages of this approach would be (i) that a program
(QCLINK) would have to be distributed to all user sites, (ii) that the program
is likely to undergo some significant evolution in its first few years of use,
thus new versions would have to be distributed and re-installed, and (iii) the
transfer protocol would only be available to HP3000s.

Otherwise, the advantages of such an approach are (i) that we would have
complete control of the development of the transfer protocol, and (ii) that
QCLINK could be made so as to run on any version of the HP3000.

2. Use FTP

FTP (file transfer protocol) is now a standard on all HP3000s running MPE/iX
4.5 and above.

The disadvantages of using FTP are: (i) that QCTerm's file transfer
capabilities would not be available to HP3000 users running on Classic
machines or on HP3000's running 4.0 or below. We ourselves have a production
917 running 4.0 (and will probably not upgrade it for the remainder of its
life) and operate several Micro XE machines, so we could only use this
capability on a fraction of our installed HP3000s. (ii) Rene's checkpoint
recovery capability would not be available.

The advantage of FTP is that it is rapidly becoming a universal standard, thus
file transfers could be made between not only an HP3000 and the PC, but also
between most other machines.

3. Reverse engineer and use WRQ's PCLINK protocol

This may seem a particularly unsavory approach, but it is almost certainly not
illegal. WRQ has passed out the PCLINK client program freely for many years
now and has encouraged VARs to do the same. Indeed, we've been doing this for
many years ourselves in our own AICS account, as have any number of other
VARs. The result is that PCLINK appears on virtually every HP3000, most likely
in numerous places in many accounts.

The primary advantage of this approach is that it would require no work on the
part of the HP3000 user to install new versions of a LINK-like client on his
or her machine. The secondary advantage is that the approach would work on any
version of the HP3000.

The disadvantages of this approach (outside of a few cease and desist letters)
are those mentioned above: (i) file transfers would be restricted to HP3000s,
and (ii) there would be no checkpoint recovery protocol.

Comments would be greatly appreciated.

Wirt Atmar