For those of you who telnetted into our machine using QCTerm to see the
"slides" presentation that I put up a few weeks ago, I've spent a week and
created a second try at putting a multimedia instructional "video" up on our
918DX. The entire process was programmed up in the 30-year-old BASIC/V,
running in interpreted mode, not compiled, and certainly not in NM. It
presents such a light load to the 3000 that it's not worth the trouble of
doing any more than this.

This attempt was meant to be a more professional try at putting together an
instructional "video" -- with the obvious exception that I didn't go out and
round up a professional announcer (you're going to get me instead).

The subject of this interactive video is POSIX symbolic links on the HP3000.
The script for this material comes almost unmodified from a program you all
already have and can be found in:

     :posixcbt.lsn.sys

although very few have ever run the program. The content of the "posixcbt"
program is actually quite good; the presentation is a little klunky, simply
because it was designed to run on a standard HP terminal.

I chose the symbolic links lecture because it is one of the nicer features of
POSIX and yet is one of the least used. Indeed, because of the way that it
was implemented into MPE, it really isn't even a POSIX feature at all any
more. It is now a full-fledged member of the MPE command set -- and you never
have to say the word "posix" to use it.

To view the lecture, be sure that you have Version 0.86 of QCTerm. If you
don't, you can get a new copy from:

     http://aics-research.com/qcterm

All you need do is download it and unzip it to update your copy of QCTerm.
You will also need to be on a PC that is set to at least 16-bit color, an
800x600 screen resolution, and has a sound card in it.

To view the interactive video, telnet to 209.181.113.217 and logon as:

     :hello yourname,demo.qcterm

Once on, type "b" to run BASIC and then type:

     >run posix

This version of QCTerm still requires all of the sound and graphics files to
be downloaded before the program begins. We'll change that sometime in the
near future, but for this version, you're going to have to wait approx. 4
minutes to download all of the sound files (posix10.wav is the last in the
sequence, just for your information).

The coming forms mode is going to be 85% of the hard-core, practical
reason-of-being for using QCTerm's van Gogh mode, but I think that there may
be at least 15% reason-of-use in using this same capability as a method to
create interactive tutorials, lectures, and help files.

I would appreciate any comments, positive or negative, regarding this second
stab. If nothing else, you wouldn't tend to believe that all of this is
coming from an HP3000, running only a 30-year-old BASIC*.

Wirt Atmar

*And of course, you're not limited to using only BASIC. We're totally
agnostic about which programming language you use. It only has to be able to
accept input from the keyboard and be able to write to the terminal's screen.