jim@eda.com (Jim Budler) (11/17/89)
joseph@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Seymour Joseph) writes: } Seymour Joseph } P.S. The revision 0 Apple ][ I Purchased in 1978 still works. We } had to buy third-party paddles though.... ;-) Yup, mine too. I don't own it any more, I sold it to a friend when I got my Mac. He's still got it. He got Mac fever, and is going to take a "Test Drive" on a new SE. But not because it has failed. It was fun. Bought with minimum memory, one disk. Packed with memory and a Pascal board (64k, wow!), and a CPM card, and a disk added. Got the Applesoft ROMS at a swap meet (real Apple marked ROMS), so it was a Apple ][+. Added one of those little encoder boards so it had upper *and* lower case!! My only gripe with Apple throughout this (I mean system gripe) is and always has been ASCII support. In 1978 they brought into this world a machine which was monocase, stupid! In 1983 they brought into this world a machine without a control key or an escape key, stupid! Other people complain about key placement, etc. I work with dozens (well 5) of different keyboards daily. Placement I can live with, absence is harder. 'Till recently on the Mac I worked with 4 different terminal programs to accomplish all my telecom needs. Each had a different method for handling escape and control. Some with better transfer protocols, but lousy escape handling (couldn't get to ~ or `, or both), or mediocre vt100 emulation so they were no good for UN*X. Recently, I encountered ZTerm 0.85. Very recently, as it only became available per the About... on October 31. This seems a very solid vt100 emulation, the ~/` key is escape, shift gives ~, option gives ` (only one modifier each, unlike some others), and supports (solidly) zmodem, ymodem, ymodem batch, ymodem-G (what's that?), xmodem 1k, xmodem classic, CompuserveB (author's notes caution upload doesn't seem to work), text capture and send with pacing options, and MacBinary. And it has a scrollback buffer. I've used it with vi, emacs, unix, GEnie, Compuserve, Delphi. During a direct connect to a fast Unix box running zmodem (rz/sz courtesy of Omen Technology) it consistently hits 94% plus of baud rate! Only complaint so far: GNU emacs draws the status bar (next to the bottom line) in standout mode. When you type off the bottom of the screen emacs jumps up one half screen. ZTerm loses the standout on the bottom line, and during remainding actions emacs rewrites individual characters in standout. It can get pretty ugly. ^L fixes it. Pretty trivial. I expect it will get fixed. It also loses the standout when a screensaver kicks in, or a DA covers it. So do all the others I've tried. Again, fixable. Shareware: $30 if you use it often. $40 if you expect the next update in the mail. Not sure about the "often", most allow 30 to 45 days. I have 3 more weeks on the 30, 5 more on the 45. I already use it often, but I want some more time with it. If my current perception continues for 3-5 more weeks I'll send in the $40 with a letter asking not for the *next* but for a disk when the author is willing to remove the "The Early Days" from the about box. Version 1.0? Boy! has this become a "stream of consciousness" blabber? Definately! Oh, well, sorry if I bored you. jim -- Jim Budler jim@eda.com ...!{decwrl,uunet}!eda!jim compuserve: 72415,1200 applelink: D4619 voice: +1 408 986-9585 fax: +1 408 748-1032