Tracy writes and essentially answers his own comment:

> It was mentioned the other week by another and myself
>  that my sessions in QCTerm have been disconnecting without
>  apparent reason.
>
>  In further experience, I've noticed that this has only
>  been happening when using QCTerm when using Dial-up
>  networking with my local ISP.  It hasn't happened yet
>  when I'm using my NIC card at work and going out through
>  my company's firewall.

The internet, if it travels over ordinary phone-grade phone lines, as it does
from dial-up modems to your ISP, is still subject to all the snaps, cracks,
and pops of line noise. Some of these are going to be significant enough to
occasionally break the telnet connection. (Q: Why do telephone lines
occasionally hum? A: They don't know the words.)

Nonetheless, even in these circumstances, I've grown to be very impressed
with the resiliency of the internet over phone lines as compared to the
"toughness" of the ordinary modem connections that we were using just a few
years ago. It wasn't long ago that I used to sit here and curse like a sailor
when trying to work on a customer's machine somewhere else in the country.
With dial-up PPP or SLIP connections, my level of cursing has dropped off
considerably.

But when you get onto internet-grade connections, I am just wildly impressed.
We have left connections open to Neil Harvey's machine in South Africa open
for weeks at a time and had no trouble at all -- and there the fibre optic
cable wends itself through every curve and over every fall of the Great
Zambesi River, alligators constantly chomping on the cable.

(Actually, it's just a satellite hop, but that's not nearly as romantic.)

Wirt Atmar

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