delton@pro-carolina.cts.COM (Don Elton) (01/16/88)
re: //e enhancement kit: The problem with losing data at 1200+ baud on an unenhanced //e is a well known bugs. Some programs choose to work around the bug by bypassing parts of the defective firmware. Since the fix is readily available and already in place in most //e's I chose not to do this. The 80 column firmware on the //e is on the motherboard and not on the 80 column card incidentally. It's one of the chips replaced by the //e enhancement kit. I just couldn't see adding to the size of TIC's code to support the minority of users using the older hardware when they can always ask for nulls if there's some reason they can't use the enhancement kit. re: polling mode for TIC It would not that big a deal to support non-interrupt driven communication cards though performance will obviously not be as good, particularly at higher baud rates (Note that TIC's baud rate range is from 300-19,200 baud). I'll have to think about this some more as a possible feature for TIC. A feature like this may just cause more tech support headaches when users wonder why they're losing data. At least now when they don't receive any data at all they know that they're at fault but if they receive some data they'll possibly assume TIC's at fault and give me grief. re: shareware demo's The idea of only giving away demo versions of shareware is probably a good one. By the time I decided this might be the way to go with TIC, there were already some pretty functional versions of the software available on various services. Depending on who publishes it, I might go the demo route with the 16-bit version of TIC though and see how that goes. re: Kermit I'll have a kermit in TIC Pro more than likely. I think emulations without kermit are frequently useful as not everyone has a need to transfer files from a mainframe to their micro -- perhaps only a minority of users are sofisticated enough to even consider the possibility of file transfers in fact. I suspect that most users just use the mainframe's editors/programs etc to manipulate their data where it sits since most users wouldn't know what to do with the data once they got it on their apple anyway. UUCP: [ ihnp4 sdcsvax nosc ] !crash!pro-carolina!delton ARPA: crash!pro-carolina!delton@nosc.mil INET: delton@pro-carolina.cts.com Pro-Carolina: 803-776-3936 (300-2400 baud, login as 'register')