Michael asks:

> Is Advanced Telnet available on invent9k?

No, not at this time.


>  If not can it be installed?

The answer is yes. We're ready at our end, but we need to talk to the person
who is CSY's Jeff Bandle's equivalent for HP-UX to make it happen.
Unfortunately, we can't do it by ourselves and I can only hope that the
person who is responsible for the telnet software on the HP9000 is as open
and enthusiastic as Jeff Bandle has been for the HP3000.



>  In the current computing environment, I see QCTERM & Advanced Telnet as a
>  great Long-Distance Telnet solution.
>  Actually, (Correct me if I'm wrong Wirt) if the QCTERM Vision does come to
>  be, then QCTERM may also be a good screen/application front-end designer
>  solution.

I am as enthusiastic too. The forms mode of QCTerm employs many of the things
that we learned from our "advanced telnet" work so expect that it will be
amazingly responsive, regardless of the distance that the host is away from
the client. A host on the other side of the planet, connected by a very
low-bandwidth connection, will still seem extremely responsive.

But just as importantly, thanks to our many discussions with Tom Brandt, who
acted as our initial guinea pig in all of this, we've deduced a very simple
architectural construction for the forms mode that allows it to be completely
host machine, operating system and language agnostic.

QCTerm will only run on Windows (any version) as a client, but that's 99.99%
of the desktops in the commercial environment. But we have deduced a means to
put a very pretty forms mode together so that the back-end host operating
system and language is irrelevant. Designing the input screens is a
significant portion of the work of putting an application together. With the
new QCTerm forms mode, after you've done it once, you'll be able to move your
host-based application code from machine to machine and from OS to OS and
hardly notice the difference.

We were always planning on implementing this host-agnostisity into QCTerm,
but we were doing it primarily to make development on the HP3000 easy, safe
and extremely enjoyable. As Tom Brandt very astutely and very presciently
pointed out to us last year, much before November, having the development
*not* specifically tied to the HP3000 will probably encourage a great deal of
new development on the HP3000 simply because a developer won't feel so
trapped by heavily investing his effort into the HP3000 and then lose it all
if anything untoward should happen to the HP3000.

Beyond the platform-agnostisity, one of the nice things about the design of
the new forms mode is that we've been able to easily capture the
psychological speed and rapidity of "advanced telnet" in the upcoming forms
mode, but without having to require that the software at the host end be
modified in any particular manner. It will all still be done under telnet,
but it won't require any modifications to the host telnet client software.
All we need to do is simply be able to control echo on/off, and that's a
capability that's built into virtually every telnet-capable server.

Wirt Atmar

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