During my spare time over the last several days, I've put together a more
fully multimedia presentation using QCTerm. The talk that I've prepared as a
first trial at putting multimedia on our HP3000 is a recap of the talk that I
gave at last year's HPWorld in San Francisco.

Over the last few months, I've grown more enthusiastic about the
possibilities of us using QCTerm to provide not only a standard terminal
emulator and a much enhanced GUI forms interface, but also as an educational
mechanism. I spend probably 30% of my day -- virtually every day -- teaching
people how to use our products over the phone, at one or two hour stretches
at a time. QCTerm, with a very few slight modifications, offers us the
possibility of my recording a lot of this material and letting people watch
it as often as they want, whenever they want, from wherever they find
convenient. Doing that will not only relieve some of my burden (which I truly
don't mind all that much), but more importantly, it will actually increase
the number of people that I can talk to at any one time and increase our
customers capacity to watch this material at their convenience. It's become
clear of late that Ive personally become a limiting factor in our own success.

The thing I'd like to show you now is simply a first stab at at this.
Hopefully, what you see here will look quite primitive in a few months. To
see (and now hear) the San Francisco talk, telnet into our 918DX
(209.181.113.217) and sign on as:

      yourname,demo.qcterm

Then type "b" for BASIC, and then type:

      >run slides

Let me warn you at the outset that in the current design of QCTerm, all of
the sound and graphics files are downloaded before QCTerm begins to play the
program. Most normally, that's the way that you would want to do it, but in
this case, there are 3MB of files to download -- and the 918 only has a 56K
frame relay circuit attached to it, so it will take about 7-9 minutes for
these files to download.

In a soon-to-be-released version of QCTerm, you'll only have to wait for the
first sound or image files to download; everything after that will download
silently in the background, as you watch the program. I estimate that for
this specific talk, using the next version of QCTerm, your initial wait time
will be cut to 23 seconds.

All of this downloaded material is being cached in the c:\aics\cache folder
on your PC, thus if you watch this talk again, you'll find that the talk will
run instantly. If you want to purge all of this material after you watch,
simply purge the cache folder (it will rebuild itself automatically).

Let me explain how I put this talk together.

I put all the slides that you will together using nothing more elaborate than
EDIT/3000. There are 34 slides in the talk, labeled SLIDE1 to SLIDE34. I
actually did this half a year ago, just a few days before HPWorld.

A few days ago, on Sunday evening, I recorded 32 voice snippets (two of the
slides have no sound) using the Sound Recorder that comes with every version
of MS Windows. Once you get the hang of using this very easy-to-use program,
it works surprisingly nicely. The sound is compressed 10:1 during the
recording using GSM encoding (an algorithm that was invented in Europe for
European cell phone usage). Of all of the codecs that I have tried, GSM
provides the highest quality sound at the highest level compression; on a 56K
link, the sound files arrive in one-third the time they take to play. Better
yet, the GSM codec has been in Windows since the earliest versions of Win95.

Each snippet of sound is attached to its respective slide. This is a very
easy way for an amateur to create a sound track. Doing one slide at a time is
a thousand times easier than having to speak for the entire 20 minute run of
the talk.

You'll notice that I stumble a bit here and there. If the first take was
anywhere near to acceptable, I just left it. It seemed like more of a natural
talk to me that way -- and no one would ever mistake me for a highly
polished, silver-tongued snake oil salesman :-).

Although it may not look like it, QCTerm is still operating as a terminal --
and it's still just as interactive. If you want to quit the talk, type "X",
followed by a carriage return. If you want to go to a particular slide, type
"16" (or whatever slide number you want), followed by a CR.

When the program exits, you will be in the SLIDES program. You can at that
point, if you wish, type "LIST" to see the code that's driving the slides.
The advancement of the slides is coming from the HP3000, using a timed-read.
The SLIDES program is reading each one of the flat-file slides, one at a
time, and presenting them to the QCTerm display, and waiting for either the
timed read to time-out or for you to type something.

If you wish to see what constitutes the slides, exit BASIC and type "EDITOR"
to get into EDIT/3000, and then type:

      /t slide16

or whatever slide you wish to see.

All of this code is completely open. There are no passwords or firewalls. And
none of the code is protected in any way. Should you accidentally modify the
code, it isn't a catastrophe. We have backups. Just let me know that you
think it might a little fouled.

Wirt Atmar