Your fav Apple II telecom package?

[Keatah]

So what's your favorite telecommunications package? It could range anywhere from a set of BASIC programs that came with your modem or "specialty" stuff for the Apple Cat-II. Maybe something more complete like ASCII Express & ProTERM is the order of the day. Incidentally both AE and PT were my favorites for many reasons.

 

I loved the complexity and richness of ASCII Express' menus. Seemed to cover every possible scenario and supported every modem ever made. Including the venerable D.C. Hayes MicroModem II. It was also an "established" piece of software so I felt confident in using it and wouldn't be wasting time learning useless garbage. And of course it was how we discovered WaReZ. Not only that it was customizable into a very light BBS style affair. I'm certain that AE evolved into one last hurrah that had a GUI-like interface, anyone recall what that was? AE was the first terminal that I really got into.

 

Later on in the mid-late 80's AE fell out of favor as MouseText on the //e became a thing. AE had aged gracefully however. But nothing could compete with faux Macintosh-like interface of ProTERM. PT had good hardware support and was made from the ground-up for ProDos - something AE was modded and patched to handle. Surprisingly well I might add. PT covered the major ASCII, X, Y, Z modem, and Kermit protocols nicely. Had a great editor (which I'd use exclusively for writing stuff) and PT-specific macros.

 

It should be noted that both telecom packages came with superb documentation that even included some introduction to how modems and the infrastructure worked. Something you just don't see anymore today.

Edited June 22, 2021 by Keatah

[desiv]

Initially, I used ModemMGR.  Mostly because I had a setting wrong on my SSC and initially that was the only program that worked consistently with it and my PC running tcpser.  It worked, but wasn't quite what I would call intuitive for me...

 

Found out what setting I needed to change on my SSC (It was the interrupts DIP switch) and then moved over to Proterm and that has been working great; so I have been sticking with that...

 

I don't know if I have looked at AsciiExpress yet...

[Keatah]

20 minutes ago, desiv said:

Initially, I used ModemMGR.  Mostly because I had a setting wrong on my SSC and initially that was the only program that worked consistently with it and my PC running tcpser.

I still make those kinds of mistakes today.

 

20 minutes ago, desiv said:

I don't know if I have looked at AsciiExpress yet...

AE had a small audience because it was early in the game. And while I enjoyed the "comprehensively complex" menus I'm willing to bet many folks were happy to see that sort of thing become automatic or just simply hidden away.

[The Usotsuki]

Apple II Access is decent, at least.

[Baldrick]

I did use Ascii Express almost eclusively in th 80s and into the 90s.  I never had a IIe at the time so I couldn't run ProTerm and I saw that I was beginning to get shut out of the BBS scene as more and more switched to ProTerm interfaces.  Didn't much matter by then I was switching to Mac and it's telecom packages and settling on ZTerm quite early in the game.  Zterm was the bomb on earlier macs (and still is today) becasue it had such great Terminal emulation - including the all important (for me) VT-220 with it's funny keyboard.

Anyway, I have only recently in modern times been able to acquire IIes and IIcs and ProTerm is pretty much the defacto standard.

 

But back in the 80s?  Ascii Express 100%, and its associated AE-Lines, one of which I ran myself.

 

Edited June 23, 2021 by Baldrick