Ideally, the software will also:
◼ Accommodate a variety of modem types.
◼ Designate the host—which computer will manage the echo back (which makes the typed conversation appear on both screens).
◼ Let you choose different protocols.
All those features, of course, might still not let you communicate easily with your corporate computer. It may not use the ASCII code, for instance, which most micros do.
“Since you ASCII’d, anyway,” as PC Magazine once punned, “those five letters are an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” With ASCII, an “A” is one combination of 1s and 0s, “B” is another, “,” is another, and so on.
When communicating with a mainframe capable of ASCII, it may not matter what brand of micro you’re running. So don’t reflexively think Big Blue for telecommuting.
The proud IBM mainframes, however, like aloof mandarins of old China, jabber away in a dialect of their own, EBCDIC—it’s similar to ASCII but different enough to cause serious problems. Now that doesn’t mean your home computer won’t work with an IBM mainframe. But it may require special programming that will translate from one set of codes to another.
Of course your corporate mainframe may also need a string of control characters to open or close an electronic file, and here your word-processing software may matter more than your communications program.
The control characters normally are just letters tapped out in combination with the control key to give commands to your computer. They generally don’t print out on paper; they may or may not show on the screen. In this case, controls characters pass the commands on to another machine over the wires. And so you may have to embed the control characters in your electronic files. If your word processor won’t let you embed control characters, you may not be able to communicate with some kinds of mainframes. WordStar lets you do this.