[net.micro.amiga] Online! communications program

rivers@bnl.UUCP (mark rivers) (01/14/86)

There is a terminal emulator program on the market for the Amiga called
Online! from Micro-Systems Software in Boca Raton, FL.  It takes good
advantage of hte Amiga's pull down menus, and offers quite a bit of
flexibility.  For instance, there are 7 separate "translation tables" to
use when sending characters to the disk, printer, out to host etc.  The
provisions for saving "set up modes" and "script files" (login
procedures or indeed whole terminal sessions) are very good.

	However, in the few days I have had to use the program I
have found some serious problems of which prospective buyers should be
aware.

	1) The VT-100 end VT-102 emulations are flawed. So much so
that both the Unix "vi" and VAX/VMS EDT editors are basically unusable.  
The program often does not enter alternate keypad mode when it is supposed to.
The cursor loses track of where it is supposed to be, does not insert
properly, etc.  This is a very serious problem.

	2) Whenever the program enters reverse video mode in VT-100 or
VT102 mode, it never exits it (screen permanently stuck in reverse
video). Very annoying.

	3) The output to the display screen is VERY slow.  The program
does run at 9600 baud, but the real throughput is less than 1200
baud.  The time required to "cat" a 21623 character file to the screen
at 9600 baud under Unix was 205 seconds, effective baud rate of about
1050 (105 chars/sec).

	4) There is a problem in capturing simple text files and having
them appear normally under Amiga DOS.  AmigaDOS files have only a Line Feed
at the end of each line.  If the host transmits CR + LF (as most
hosts will), one would like to be able to delete the CR when saving the
file to disk.  Online! does have "translation tables" for file capture,
but unfortunately one can only REPLACE one character with another.  If
one replaces CR with 00 (NULL), ED objects because the file then
contains "binary".  A kluge is to replace CR with "blank", or to write a
filter program to remove CR on the Amiga.  One would have thought that
such a basic operation would have been built into the program.

	5) Because of the slow speed of screen display, it would be
nice to be able to turn off the screen display when capturing large
files.  This would make it possible to capture large files quickly, and
turn on the screen display occasionally to see when it was done.  This
is not possible in Online!.

	6) When downloading files with the XMODEM protocol it would be
nice to be able to write the files to the RAM: disk, since the transfer
seems to be "floppy bound" (effective transfer rate about 150 chars/sec
max).  I could not make this work.

	I talked to the company and they claim that the VT-100
emulation problems are fixed in release 1.1.  Buyers should insist on
V1.1 if the VT-100 emulation is important to them.  The company offered
me the upgrade for the cost of the postage.


Mark Rivers
Bldg 901A
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Upton, NY 11973

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