GRAND has been officially announced in France recently. I immediately gave it
a try... I first  did TELL GRAND AT FRMOP11 GIMME CONFER. It  send a huge bunch
of files.  Took 30 minutes  for them to arrive.  Well... PROCEED (btw  have you
ever  worked with  a 3215  full-screen emulator  on the  system console?  :-) )
The files filled up my  90% disk of course, and I had to  move them to a system
disk to  be able  to continue.  The fileids  of the  various components  of the
packages are  "selfish": they use  common names which  could be used  for other
local execs.  I was  glad to  see that  they had  to change  the name  of TITLE
MODULE to _TITLE after the first release... :-)
 
  Well, I typed CONFER and got a  menu display. Looked quite nice besides. Then
I pressed PF10  to see the list  of topics and here  you are, I got  a bunch of
errors from REXX. Return code -3 from IOX MODULE. This module had not been sent
by GRAND,  nor did CONFER  complain about  it not being  there. Nor did  it set
trace off to avoid the error messages. It just assumed it was there. But, never
mind, the  exec seemingly worked correctly  without the thing. Granted,  it's a
pain to have to clear the screen everytime you press a key, but...
 
  Then I looked at the various conferences. They were all empty of course since
the server was just started. I tried to  review one of the items and it said it
was not available locally, do you want to  order it from the server? YES. I got
the following complaint from RSCS as soon as I pressed ENTER:
 
Invalid NJI parameter "(" on file tag -- parameter ignored
Invalid NJI parameter "BITNET=Y" on file tag -- parameter ignored
 
  Geez, that exec definitely generates a  lot of garbage error messages, but it
doesn't prevent it  from working. The server accepted the  command, and said he
had not  the file and  was forwarding to another  server. 10 minutes  later the
file had not arrived so I left home  after sending a note the the GRAND people.
 
  The reply was that right, IOX MODULE is needed and should have been placed in
the startup package, and right about the NJI error messages but it doesn't pre-
vent it from  working so... Question: can I obtain  IOX MODULE without ordering
the whole  5,000,000,000 lines package again?  GET IOX MODULE says  the file is
not known. Answer: no, it's not possible, but with GET CSTARTER PACKAGE it will
send less files. 10 minutes later I had  the module and about 5-6 other files I
already had and discarded. The REXX  errors disappeared but the NJI errors were
still there.
 
  I then tried to contribute to a topic. It worked quite nicely until I stupid-
ly pressed PF3, which is set to "move cursor to end of line" on my XEDIT setup.
If I really  want to exit from XEDIT  without saving, I go to  the command line
and type "QQ",  it takes about 2  seconds and it's not dangerous.  But here PF3
was QQUIT without any  kind of confirmation. I was in a good  mood when it hap-
paned so I  decided to do ONE retry  and managed not to press  PF3 again. After
the usual NJI error messages the server said the contribution had been accepted
 
  But it did NOT  appear on my copy of the conference!! The  index was as empty
as before!!!! So I  tried to order the VM FORUM  conference again. Without suc-
cess. I even spent 15 minutes looking at  all the help file -- this just is NOT
possible. If you have  it you can't order it again.  I eventually switched from
good mood to angry  mood, "let me erase all the  directory conference crap from
all the disks and we'll see if it  still refuses to order it", and of course it
no longer did :-) I could even check my contribution was there! :-)
 
  Then I asked... Is there a way I can subscribe to the CONFER PACKAGE to auto-
matically  get copies  of updated  programs? Preferably  with a  prologtext for
LISTSERV? The  SUBSCRIBE command does not  work. Answer: it seems  you can only
subscribe to  a conference, not a  package... As for prologtext  this option is
not implemented anyway.
 
  In the  meanwhile the IBM-NETS  file had arrived. I  realized I did  not care
about it and discarded  it. What is nice is you don't know  what the heck is in
the file  until you order  it, and when  you order it you  have ALL of  it. You
can't order just the index, or an exerpt (say, the last 5 entries)...
 
  I've not  announced the thing  yet to  the users. I'm  afraid I get  too many
questions, especially  with the NJI  error message which would  certainly scare
90% of users ("Hey, what have I  done wrong, it complains about invalid parame-
ter on  NIGJI-dunnowhat???"). And too much  network load -- trust  the users to
order all the conferences to see if one of them is interesting...
 
  Also it was funny to see that  this paraphernalia was used to distribute some
ARPA capharnaum :-)
 
  Eric
 
 
 
begin (* Main program *)
 
  GRAND:=modest_name('GRANDiose Computer Conferencing System');
 
  GRANDiose:=cornucopia(paraphernalia(ARPA+BITNIC),IBM_internal_use_only,VNET);
 
  while not network_saturated do
   begin
     press(PF10);
     repeat
       coffee_break
     until file_has_arrived;
     read_topic;
     if not topic_interesting then trash_topic
   end
end;-)