I've been receiving e-mails with increasing frequency asking something like: "It's been six months since you put up a new version of QCTerm on your website. Is it dead? Are you planning on making any future enchancements to the product?" Let me say that QCTerm is definitely not dead. In fact, it's just because of the opposite that we haven't put up a new release lately. We've completely rewritten QCTerm from top to bottom to incorporate a whole raft of new features that we're racing to try to get ready for the Philadelphia HPWorld show. It now looks like we're going to make it with a little bit of time to spare and we will probably release a new version in early September. You won't notice much difference in QCTerm if you use it only as a terminal emulator. As you might expect, the terminal's behavior is relatively static and won't change much from now on. We have just a few things that remain to be added. As one person recently wrote us, "if you could have it support file xfer, you'd rule the world!" While ruling the world is a grand and noble ideal (if you're the ruler), that has to be put off for a little while. File transfer will come, but it remains towards the bottom of our to-do list. Finishing the first pass as the van Gogh forms mode is at the top. It's clear that we could write QCTerm to compete head on with a browser-like interface, albeit using a different syntax, but there's no reason for us to do that. Browsers already exist and we'd be adding no value at all to anyone if we were to do that. Indeed, we'd just be wasting our time and a great deal of money. Instead, what we're attempting to do is provide a very simple (with an emphasis on simple) -- but very attractive interface -- so that anyone can write and develop applications on the HP3000, using any language that they feel comfortable with, and yet hopefully so confuse the end-user that he or she couldn't tell that they were running an application on an HP3000 three thousand miles away or on a PC on their desk. What's taking so long is that we don't have a road map to govern this current work. We're just feeling our way along, creating interfaces, seeing how we like them, and unfortunately discarding more than one major attempt. But the good news is that the interface design keeps getting simpler, and that's something that I very much want in the final version. And the second piece of good news is, as always, all of this will be free for you to use, as much or as often as you wish, if you care to do so. Wirt Atmar