From: MAX                 
To: SNAKEBYTE           
Subject: German         
Date & Time: 10/01/90 21:07:25
Message Number  9415

Well, hey, the Trash-80 has all the "special language" characters built
in, plus a complete graphic set which has nothing to do with anything
else (or anything useful, for that matter), 64 mysterious "space
compression codes" which can occasionally be put to good use over BBS's
that support TRS-80 graphics (I know of one in the entire world that
does, but there used to be, gosh, five or six!), and a set of kana
characters for the tens and tens of Japanese who need to run a TRSDOS
compatible machine.  At any rate, true ANSI terminals also have special
graphics sets.
   So in theory, a BBS could translate from its own system's terminal
codes to those of the remote user "on the fly."  I have seen this in 
limited use on C-Net, which supports Commodore, Skypic and ANSI
graphics, but the only boards that actually seem to put this to use
(except for mainframe operating systems) are remote Z-System boards,
which usually know 50 or so different terminal types and let you do
neat things like "point and shoot" at the files in the current
directory that you want to download, because it knows your terminal's
movement, highlighting, and usually arrow-key commands.  Of course,
there are only about 50 Remote Z boards out there and most of them
have absolutely useless BBS programs (you think the TRS-80 version of
PBBS needs help, you should see the CP/M program that goes by the
same name).
   ...at any rate, MS-DOS bashing aside, you'd think that if a BBS
could do that on a computer with 64K running an 8K DOS and a 20K
BBS program on a 4 MHz Z80A, that the 600K+ Remote Access BBS could
figure it out, too... considering that on Z, that's a function of the
8K DOS, not the bloody BBS program!!!