Per writes:

> At first I was extremely excited about it, and I think anyone should
>  be... except for (if I understand it correctly) its inability to handle
>  our national characters, which makes it unusable for us as a standard
>  terminal emulator. I don't know if there are ways (or plans of AICS) to
>  make QCTerm handle diacriticals, if not, we simply can't run our main
>  application with it :-(

We will support diacriticals "soon" (in the finest Atmarian-calendaric
sense). The current version of QCTerm is written in 16-bit VB3. We found
font-switching to be extremely slow in this version of VB, thus we were
compelled to put the line-drawing characters where the European
diacritically-marked characters would have been, all inside one font. For the
vast majority of people, the line drawing set was more important initially
than the diacriticals.

We have two paths to adding diactricals to QCTerm open to us: one is to
convert all of QCTerm's code to VB6 and use DBCS (double-byte character
system). Instead of being limited to only 256 characters, we would now have
65,000 characters available to us in one font. The other is to develop a
fast-switching font routine, usable in either VB3 or VB6. We haven't decided
yet which one we'll do, but we will do one or the other "soon."

>  However it has amazing features, which could be of interest to anyone
>  (using any language or even any host, I guess).

The "any host" part is becoming more and more true. While we're developing
all of this to make applications development very easy on the HP3000, we're
also "neuterizing" QCTerm so that the application QCTerm is being driven by
can be a Linux, Unix, or NT machine just as easily as an HP3000. QCTerm will
primarily use only telnet and anonymous FTP, and we've been practicing with
these other boxes to insure that what we're doing is using a set of behaviors
that represent a lowest common denominator so that any of these OS'es will be
usable.

While that may sound like an abandonment of the beloved HP3000, I actually
think that our doing this is necessary to the promotion of the HP3000. If
QCTerm doesn't have a shot of at least in some sense becoming a "standard",
it will be relegated to being one more off-the-wall, "proprietary"
application that isolates rather than invites HP3000 usage.

Besides, you all will have a several year headstart on using it, if you wish.


Shawn writes about his attempts at viewing the talk:

> 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.

One of the nice things about the internet is that when things go wrong, you
don't have a clear idea of what failed. As best I can tell, everything here
worked well during your attempts -- and continued that way for others.
However, for the period 5:00AM to 8:00AM MST, the time frame that you were
on, things were congested. The 918DX that you signed onto is only an
eight-user machine and was running fully loaded for almost all of that time.

Things have settled down quite a bit now. Try again if you don't mind. And if
you haven't downloaded a new version of QCTerm recently, I would suggest
that, too. I doubt that being on a cable modem should make any difference.
What it sounds like is that one or the other FTP clients (QCTerm's or the
HP3000's, or even possibly your ISP) gave up on the connection, declaring
that the connection to be dead due to an excessive time out at one end or the
other.


Steve writes:

> I connected no problem (over DSL).  The images and sound clips took about 20
>  minutes to download, but then displayed as pretty as can be.  I didn't hear
>  any sounds, but that could be my PC.

Fooey. The talk without sound certainly can't be much to listen to. However,
now that you've spent the time to download the sound files into your PC, you
can play with the sound files wholly locally and discover why they aren't
working.

Use Windows Explorer and go to the c:\aics\cache folder and double click on
any one of the .wav files (the bigger it is, the longer it'll run). If your
PC has sound capabilities, you should hear sound. If not, you have an easy
mechanism to locally debug your PC and see why not (it could be something as
simple as having the speakers plugged into the wrong jack).

Once you get it working, sign back on. This time, there will be no delay;
you've already downloaded the necessary files. The HP3000 is necessary to
drive the animation of the slides and sound playout.

Wirt Atmar