Sinclair Survival Column

Continuing on our recent theme of telecommunications for the Sinclair computers (necessary for you to join us in C*SIX, the Computer Shopper Information Exchange, on DELPHI), this month we take a look at another new terminal program for the QL. Q_Link is published by Meta Media Productions (726 West 17th; Vancouver, BC V5Z IT9; CANADA) and written by Harvey Taylor.

Q_Link is written to work with just about any type of modem you might have, but we will assume that the average user these days has a Hayes compatible modem for purposes of this review. (The program itself gives you the ability to customize the commands if you do not in fact have a modem utilizing the Hayes (AT) command set.

Although Q_Link will allow you to dial by using your telephone dial and then activating your modem, the most convenient way-if you have an autodial modem—is to let the program send the necessary codes and then watch your modem do its magic. The default dialing command with Q_Link is the Hayes ATDP (ATtention Dial Pulse). If you are connected to a phone system which is Touch Tone compatible you may want to change this default to the ATDT (ATtention Dial Pulse) command which will dial much quicker. In either case the pulse method of dialing will indeed work.

You initially will have to enter a list of online services and/or BBS’s which you will want to have available to you and which the program will automatically dial for you. You are allowed up to 20 characters to define the remote computer and up to 15 characters to define the telephone number to be dialed to connect to the computer, giving you enough characters to get through a PBX or Centrex type system. Q_Link also supports the necessary pauses required between requesting an outside line on these systems and receiving one.

You will also have the ability to enter a signon which will include the user ID’s or passwords which might be necessary to log on to the system you are calling. Each signon entry may be up to 59 characters long. (Once you have signed onto DELPHI you can use this to store your username and password.)

One of the nicer features on Q_ Link is its redialing feature. Often when you try to call a popular local bulletin board (more so than a major online service) you can find that it is busy. By entering a list of BBS numbers, Q_Link will attempt to connect with one of them. If when the first number is called, a NO CONNECT message is received, the program will proceed to dial the next number in the list. If the end of the list is reached without a successful connect, the first number on the list will be repeated as will the entire procedure. If you just wish a single number to be tried repeatedly, a single BBS is entered and it will be repeatedly attempted until a connection is made. If an ERROR message is received while making these attempts, your QL will start to beep at you to get your attention and will continue until you respond. This will abort the automatic redial procedure.

Once you have succeeded in connecting with the remote computer, you will want to send one of the signons which you have previously entered. Q_Link allows a total of 20 different signons which you can send with two keystrokes apiece. It your particular online service or BBS requires more than one piece of information before you can log on (such as DELPHI’s username and password), you would enter each into a separate signon string and send each at the proper time. Your signon string is not echoed to your screen for security purposes.

One of the most important features of any terminal program (and missing from most of the earliest Sinclair terminal programs) is the ability to upload (send) and download (receive/store) information from the remote computer. As the ability to send/store/retrieve programs (public domain if you please) becomes more and more sophisticated, a reliable way ot transferring the information is a must for any software which intends to become widely accepted. The earliest programs for the Sinclair computers could send from and receive to a small buffer-but without any sort of error checking protocol. No provisions were made to be able to LOAD anything into this buffer, or SAVE the contents of the buffer to tape (microdrives were unheard of in those dim ages and floppy disk drives were only for the “real” computers!). Sure there were ways of tricking the program into doing these things, and Computer Shopper readers were instructed how to do just that in this column in its pioneer days. But the program itself was unable to accomplish those feats.

Again readers of this column became aware of Xmodem protocol as it became popular and started appearing in software for our micros. Today, unless a terminal program includes Xmodem it has little chance of being widely accepted. Q_Link does not disappoint us in this respect. In fact, Q_Link is the first terminal program for the QL which I have seen which implements. not only the older Xmodem checksum transfer, but supports the Cyclic Redundancy Code (CRC) which is now gaining in popularity as it is even more reliable than Checksum. When you invoke the Xmodem transfer procedure you are asked if you wish to use CRC. If you are unsure your best bet is to fall back to the checksum method which is almost universally supported. You will then be able to follow the progress of the file transfer by way of a status screen showing the file name, mode of transmission, block number being received or sent, and the number of blocks which had to be repeated because of either a failed checksum of CRC check.

Q_Link also supports an ASCII transfer as well, and it is integrated with the Q_Link text editor for some sophisticated file and block handling. The editor allows you to prepare your text – or QL SuperBASIC program – for transmission. Once you have LOADed a file into the editor, you are not required to send the entire file thanks to the block commands. Once a block is marked you may treat the marked blocks as the entire portion of the file and either send just that block or SAVE it for future reference or use. There is even a function which enables you to remove the linefeeds from a line which may be necessary with some online systems.

One of the features of QDOS which is hardly ever taken into account by the existing software is the QL’s ability to multi-task. The usual method of switching between one task and another is CONTROL-C, which is often used in telecommunications to instruct the remote computer. Q_Link changes this to SHIFT- CONTROL-C in order to avoid this conflict. If you wish to multi-task something with Q_Link, such as a clock, it-only requires a minor modification to the BOOT program, which is documented in the Q_Link manual.

You should be aware, however, of the amount of memory which is required to run each of the tasks. Q_Link itself is somewhat of a memory hog. The program itself occupies about 25K and then proceeds to reserve space for a number of buffers. The Xmodem buffer is 16K and 32K is set aside for the Capture buffer. When you consider that an unexpanded QL has only about 81K available to the user upon powerup, and that the program immediately sets aside a total of 73K you see that there is not much RAM left to start multi-tasking.

One of the problems encountered with other OL terminal programs has been having to deal with the screen display resident in QDOS. This has been a major factor in slowing down many find programs while they had to deal with writing the incoming data to the screen. Often this results in lost characters and/or garbage on the creen while ODOS tries to catch up o the incoming information. QLink gets around this by bypassing QDOS entirely when it comes to writing to the screen. When ZOOM mode is requested for printing information is written directly to one of the two channels which make up the Q-Link screen.

With telecommunicating becoming a mainstay of the computing world, no longer relegated to the domain of the “computer nerd,” there is no reason why you should have to have anything less than the most complete telecommunications package with which to do your communicating. Time was when you needed a special modem built specifically for your Sinclair computer and the one and only software package which would work with that custom modem. The truth of the matter is that all of the Sinclair dedicated modems were in fact standard modems with an interface built in to connect to your specific computer. Although the QL comes with an RS232 port built in, there too you find that it is not as standard as one might hope, and when the QL first appeared you needed some form of hardware adapter to make some necessary modifications to the signal (specifically dealing with necessary stop bits) to allow its full use with the American standards. Such an add on is the MODAPTER. Later, programs were developed which allowed higher speed modems (1200 baud/2400 baud) to be used without additional hardware. Now the Sinclair user can go online with practically any external modem on the market. In fact, I have yet to hear of one which cannot be used on the QL, and would be interested to hear your experiences in this area.

Finally, by this time I hope that I have had the opportunity to meet many of you in the Computer Shopper SIG on DELPHI, where a number of exciting guests have been lined up for our real time get togethers. Come join with many of the Sinclair pioneers from the ZX-80 and ZX-81s earliest days in the U.K. and the U.S.. This is your opportunity to talk with them, ask them about what those initial days were like. See you on DELPHI!