Date   : Mon, 07 Jan 1985 22:04:00 MST (Mon)
From   : "Frank J. Wancho" <WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA>
Subject: TOPS-20 SQ and TOPS-20 MODEM

Bill Westfield and I were working on somewhat different versions of C
sources to SQ for TOPS-20 use, using different compilers.  My version,
based on SQU-PORT.LBR, a "portable" version, uses the "MIT C" compiler
and runtime package, and was completed shortly after Bill's
announcement, with Eliot Moss' help.

Although there are some significant differences in both versions -
look for an announcement momentarily, both produce files with a byte
size of 8.  One difference is that my version produces files with the
ITS Binary header.  This caused a problem with MODEM only - the other
CP/M-related programs for TOPS-20, such as USQ, handled this just
fine.

So, there is now a new version of MODEM (310) for TOPS-20 with
reworked automatic file type determination code, and which now also
happens to write ITS Binary files with a bytesize of 8 instead of the
old 36.

Source and a ready-to-run executable are in MICRO:<CPM.TOPS-20>MODEM.*
here.

For those of you wishing to try my version of SQ, you may FTP it from
SYS: here.  Sources are not quite ready for release yet.

As Bill noted earlier, both versions of TOPS-20 SQ are capable of
squeezing arbitrarily large TOPS-20 files (hopefully text files as
both programs assume).  Unfortunately, USQ/TYPESQ use file memory
mapping techniques which limit the size of the files that can be
handled.  (At the time USQ/TYPESQ was written, it wasn't expected to
handle but typically sized CP/M files.)  There *may* be a version of
USQ/TYPESQ available to handle such large files in the near future.
In the meantime, be aware of the potential problem.

--Frank