Lars Appel wrote:

>  judging from my experience with Samba/iX it seems to be reasonable to
>  make QCTerm available as soon as it works reasonably ok and to document
>  those parts that are still not as perfect as desired. Maybe a web page
>  can be used as a reference and updated as needed.

Of those votes that were e-mailed to me, the vote was (approx.) 35 to release
the software as soon as possible, 0 to wait until it was more complete and
thoroughly tested.

The web page is a good idea -- and we'll do that. We'll also try keep the
turnaround time become complaint and resolution to be as short as possible
and fix the more major problems that crop up as quickly as possible. It is
one more attribute that web-based distribution of software allows.

As expected, because of the nature of the people on this list, a fair number
said that the emulator won't be of much use to them until we get NS/VT (or at
least telnet) into the emulator. That feedback is important -- and
appreciated.


>  The ReadMe file is also a nice place to document known limitations or
>  bugs. It might be a good idea <humour> to rename the ReadMe file to
>  IgnoreMe or TopSecret as it might increase the chance that people take
>  the time to read it </humour> ;-) ;-) ;-)

Another good idea :-).


>  By the way, the next release of the MPE Freeware Tape might be a cheap
>  way to make it available to people not willing or able to perform large
>  downloads. It would save you the work of copying and shipping lots of
>  DDS media yourself (and the saved time could be spent on QCTerm).

I can see two problems associated with this suggestion. The first, and more
critical of the two, is that I expect QCTerm to evolve rather quickly in the
beginning. A freeware distribution would seem to make more sense only after
QCTerm is significantly more stable.

The second problem is that, unlike all of the other programs on the freeware
tape, the destination host for QCTerm is not the HP3000, but a PC. If we put
QCTerm on a DDS tape, we would have to put it there in some specific format
(such as WRQ binary protocol), so that after it was transferred to the
HP3000, it would be downloaded from the HP3000 to the PC in that format and
unzipped there. QCTerm's time on the HP3000 would be transitory. The HP3000
would only be a waystation on its trip to a PC.

Ultimately, we're intending on doing something like that: building an
autosensing version mechanism and a download & distribution program, much
like AOL operates, so that once you load a copy of QCTerm on your PC, all
future updates will come either from a web site or your HP3000. Indeed, every
time you would sign onto your HP3000, the PC would check the currency of its
version. If you were running an out-of-date QCTerm, you would get a small
message suggesting that you download the newest version.

We can do this because we're going to give the terminal emulator client away
for free. We won't care how many copies you have. And this will make keeping
everyone on the current version a lot easier. However, we're a long ways from
getting all of this to work (probably by the end of 1998 at the rate we're
moving).

Wirt Atmar