[net.micro.mac] Red Ryder 7.0 & Other Terminal Programs

waddingt@umn-cs.UUCP (Jake Waddington ) (02/01/86)

 Just to add my bit to this. The best alternative to Macterminal for
PROFESSIONAL use, (other than just talking to BBS's). is VersaTerm.
It is a good complete program with very good support. Note the current
version is 2.00 not 7.0, that is to say Mr. Abelbeck can get it right
the first time. We use VersaTerm in Our lab to talk to our 2.9 Unix system
as a graphic terminal and are very pleased. The price of VersaTerm is $100
as to $40 fo Red Ryder which is a good deal for a quality package.


disclaimer: I'm just a satisfied costumer.

				Paul Fink
				inh4!umn-cs!waddingt

lamy@utai.UUCP (Jean-Francois Lamy) (02/03/86)

In article <872@umn-cs.UUCP> waddingt@umn-cs.UUCP (Paul Fink) writes:
>
> Just to add my bit to this. The best alternative to Macterminal for
>PROFESSIONAL use, (other than just talking to BBS's). is VersaTerm.

Talk about asking for trouble... Remember...The Surgeon General has determined
that capital letters may be harmful to your health.

VersaTerm is indeed a very good program.  I use it all the time for
communication with Unix, I really like the Emacs mouse feature and it
supports XMODEM, Kermit, MacBinary and MacTerminal XMODEM.

But I frequently log on a machine at the department from which I am on
leave, which involves: reaching the local PAD by phone, changing it's
set-up, giving a network address, logging on one machine at the other end
and finally doing a remote login to the target machine.  That machine happens
to run VMS, which means that you can't do much editing unless you have a
keypad.  Red Ryder handles this non-trivial login sequence beautifully and
allows me to emulate the keypad in a reasonable fashion.  If only it had
MacTerminal XMODEM and emulated a VT100 correctly...

Professionally yours,
-- 

Jean-Francois Lamy
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto,
Departement d'informatique et de recherche operationnelle, U. de Montreal.

CSNet:      lamy@toronto.csnet
UUCP:       {utzoo,ihnp4,decwrl,uw-beaver}!utcsri!utai!lamy
CDN:        lamy@iro.udem.cdn (lamy%iro.udem.cdn@ubc.csnet)

tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) (02/03/86)

In article <872@umn-cs.UUCP> waddingt@umn-cs.UUCP (Jake Waddington ) writes:
>
>It is a good complete program with very good support. Note the current
>version is 2.00 not 7.0, that is to say Mr. Abelbeck can get it right
>the first time. We use VersaTerm in Our lab to talk to our 2.9 Unix system

If he got it right the first time, why isn't it 1.00??????

--
Tim Smith       sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim

olson@harvard.UUCP (02/04/86)

In article <872@umn-cs.UUCP> waddingt@umn-cs.UUCP (Jake Waddington ) writes:

>It is a good complete program with very good support. Note the current
>version is 2.00 not 7.0, that is to say Mr. Abelbeck can get it right
>the first time. We use VersaTerm in Our lab to talk to our 2.9 Unix system

Then, In article <413@ism780c.UUCP> tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) writes:

>If he got it right the first time, why isn't it 1.00??????

Now, I write:

Here here!  Not only that, but considering that VersaTerm's version number
has three significant digits, it is possible that at version 2.00 it has
gone through 200 revisions!  Red Ryder, on the other hand, has two sig.
digits in its version number, and presumably may have gone through 70
revisions.

No, I am NOT being serious here, and I hope Jake wasn't either.  It makes
no sense to judge a program based on its version number.  I should point
out that I don't use either of these programs (I use MacTerminal), so I
really don't know which is better designed, supported, or any of those other
things that really DO make a difference.

Another thing worth pointing out is that Red Ryder has had many TOTAL
rewrites (according to some recent InfoWorld article), and we all (well,
most would agree, anyway) know that this leads to better programs BUT
requires mucho time.  Most commercial products don't get developed that
way (this is not to say, however that VersaTerm did not-- I don't know).

I hope I've included enough self-humbling statements in this to avoid
being flamed at.  I just didn't think it was fair to compare programs
by version number.  Please, no extended exchanges on this.

-Eric.

briand@tekig4.UUCP (Brian Diehm) (02/08/86)

>>version is 2.00 not 7.0, that is to say Mr. Abelbeck can get it right
>>the first time. We use VersaTerm in Our lab to talk to our 2.9 Unix system
>
>If he got it right the first time, why isn't it 1.00??????

Actually, we've been using the first COMMERCIAL release of Versaterm, 1.52, for
over a year, and have had NO problems.  It is SO reliable that if there is
indeed a version 2.00, I presume it is feature enhancement rather than bug
fixes.

-Brian Diehm
Tektronix, Inc.