🚀 go-pugleaf

In <979@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM> ngg@bridge2.3Com.com (Norman Goodger) writes:
>I have spoken to Scott today, and yes WK11 does not support the Comm Tool
>Box and like you Leonard, Do not think that not supporting the CTB (nice
>acronym) does not mean that WK11, Microphone, or any other terminal is
>now obsolete. I think that Jurri Munki obviously does not understand what
>the CTB is, otherwise he would have not made such an ambiguous statement.

Interesting... Maybe it's not enough that I write terminal software for a
living and that I have the APDA beta release of the communications toolbox...

Now suppose that I have a user that is used to White Knight/RR. He or she
will want to use the same software at the office, but we happen to use
telnet connections instead of physical terminal connections. The toolbox
would allow this user to access the telnet services with WK/RR, if it
allowed the user to select the communication channel with the toolbox.

There's also the situation where a customer comes asking for a good Tektronix
emulator that works in color and supports the <insert-your-favorite-network-
pseudo-terminal-protocol>. The toolbox will allow that customer to connect
these two with the correct terminal software. The choice of terminal software
will then depend on the scripting/macro capabilities and user interface and
not the fact that the program is capable of using these connections.

Then there's Unix Windows. Some of you may have tried this program and
discovered that the concept works, but the terminal emulation (and
international support) is not what it should/could be. Again, the
toolbox will save you.

Of course old terminal software will be useful for a long time. At least
unless someone buys a NuBus serial card that only comes with a connection
tool for the communications toolbox. WK/RR will be unusable to this
customer.

As long as all terminal emulators are equal (as long as none of them
support the toolbox), WK/RR still has a chance in the competition.
Of course you shouldn't write an emulator that only supports CTB
connections. You should allow the user to use old-style connections
and emulators. Most users will not install CTB because it uses
some disk & RAM space and is probably marginally slower than a
custom tailored application.

Perhaps you would like to point out how I have misunderstood the
communications toolbox. I had the idea of writing the ideal terminal
emulator about two or three years ago. The project died because of
lack of funding & time. The idea was to have separate tools for
communicating (serial, uw, telnet), file transfer (kermit, xmodem)
and terminal emulation. The only real difference was that the
terminal emulation modules would have used a set of callback routines
to write & modify the screen. I also started designing international
translation modules that would be based on simple tables, but could
also call user-installed code. I stopped working on the project when
I had a multi-tty application skeleton with capability to select
tools and translators separately for each window.


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|     Juri Munkki jmunkki@hut.fi  jmunkki@fingate.bitnet        I Want   Ne   |
|     Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre        My Own   XT   |
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