Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!panda!teddy!jpn
From: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: ZCOMM is very buggy
Message-ID: <4729@teddy.UUCP>
Date: 25 Apr 88 16:50:18 GMT
References: <2598@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <10534@steinmetz.ge.com>
Reply-To: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Distribution: na
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 34

>I admit that I decided zcomm was too much trouble for
>what I wanted, but I would consider using it if I needed to present a
>friendly menu to a user who objected to typing in baud rates, etc, and
>phone numbers, and login sequences... ie. the person who uses a computer
>because s/he must, and gets no joy from it.

Huh?  This exactly the kind of person I would steer AWAY from zcomm!
There are more "user friendly" programs available.

No, my reason for using Zcomm (just sent in my registration fee) is that
it is NOT user friendly.  Unfortunately, "user friendly" is usually just
another way of saying "expert hostile".

Up till now, I have used 3 different communications programs, depending
on what I was doing.  One had a good terminal (vt100) emulator, another
had a good script language, and the third had good file transfer
capability.  All the programs I've seen excel in one of the three
areas, and fall down in the other two.  ZCOMM does all three well, but
requires that I learn a funny programming language to take full
advantage of it.  I'm not scared of new programming languages:  I
rather enjoy learning new ones.

By the way:  was I the only one who noticed that the ZCOMM documentation
that was distributed on comp.binaries.ibm.pc was incomplete?  After
extracting the (five?) sections from the .ARC file, concatinating them
together, and printing them, I noticed that the manual ended in the
middle of Chapter 20!  The last section ended in the middle of a sentence!
Not only that, various parts of the manual refer to chapters above 20
(In particular, I'd love to look at Chapter 24!)
-- 
     john nelson

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