Free 3000 terminal emulator earns update
August 22, 2007
The freeware program QCTerm, a admirable alternative for HP 3000 shops with little budget for emulator programs, just got a 3.0 version during the last week.
AICS Research, one of the oldest third parties in the HP 3000 community, developed QCTerm for its users of QueryCalc. The program's development stretches back 10 years, an extraordinary lifespan for any software offered for free. Emulator licensing fees being a roadblock to those customers during the late 1990s — as well as another facet of technical support involving emulator companies — AICS founder Wirt Atmar led a successful project, which culminated in a 1.0 version, to build software which turns a PC into an emulator — of HP 3000 terminals, as well as other hosts.
Atmar just reported to the community, over the Internet newsgroup, what the new 3.0 offers and where the program is headed in its next version.
This new version has been modernized for several new features, and because of contracts with several agencies, a number of enhancements have been added. Of all those, the one item that might be of use to you is that hotlinks to URLs have been added to the terminal’s display. If you have text anywhere on your screen that begins with an “http://” and you double-click it, we now bring up a web browser and go to the address that’s been specified.
The new version can be downloaded from
aics-research.com/qcterm/index.html
Please let me know if you have any trouble with anything. Surprisingly, QCTerm is still getting about 100 downloads a week, even though there’s less and less demand for a full HP terminal any longer.
The next major enhancement I intend is to put SSH 1 and 2 support into the terminal.
AICS is keeping the free program up to date with the latest Microsoft operating system, too.
If you’re running Vista, I’d appreciate it if you would download and try this version. Several people who are using Vista have commented on problems that they’ve had installing the older version, Version 2.1.
We have Vista machines here, but we’ve had no problems at all. I suspect the root cause of the problems lies with the installer we wrote ourselves during Windows 3.x days.
We’re using InstallShield now for the installer for the new version (and that increases the install from 2.4 MB to 14.0 MB, simply because InstallShield transports everything it might conceivably need with the installation program). This new version can now be installed anywhere that you wish, rather than merely at the c:\ root as all previous versions had to be.