ProComm Plus is pretty damn sweet

1. Admission

I'll admit, I haven't really explored the world of terminal emulators much on Windows… except for KEAterm!, SecureCRT, telnet, and Putty.

As I've mentioned previously, back when I had Windows 3.11 on a real machine, I had no networking. The machines I had at the time didn't present themselves as easy target for networking – an Amstrad CPC6128 and an Amstrad PC1512.

The 486 I had running Windows 3 did have enough ISA slots for an NE2000, but in all honesty, networking was beyond me back then.

Now, though, I have need of decent terminal emulation with Windows 3. Visionware's XVision has a terminal emulator that didn't fit the need and, although Good Enough(tm) for simple stuff, telnet.exe isn't exactly feature-rich.

So, I trawled winworldpc for a terminal emulator for Windows 3 and found one.

2. ProComm Plus

Colour me impressed, this is a really nice bit of software. It's a bit bloaty for what I need, but I doubt I'll find a better terminal easily.

Seems there's a lot of it to learn, and I'll get around to playing around with it at some point, but for my immediate need, it's perfect.

2.1. More than VT100

I was mildly surprised that it has both VT100 and VT102 support. Most old terminal emulators claim to be VT100 but actually respond as a VT102, or claim to be a VT102 but have features normally found on a VT320.

This might be moot with, say, xterm, but I do prefer terminals to be close to the real thing – especially given that I one one of the real things: a DEC VT510.

So, I fired it up. connected to a random host, and did some preliminary poking.

Well, so far so good.

The escape sequence there (^[[c – CSI Ps c – Send Primary Device Attributes) instructs the terminal to respond with essentially a model identification.

Well, not strictly a model, but a family. The first number, 62, identifies it as a "level 2" terminal: the VT2xx family.

If you wish to run this query yourself, the magic key sequence is esc+v esc [ c.

Ok, so it claims to be a VT2xx. Let's use vttest to probe it some more.

Well, that's pretty neat. ~~I think the only other terminal app I'll install is the HP-specific one. I'll use that to connect to my HP-UX machines once they're back up and running.~~ Well, turns out HP's terminal doesn't support winsock.