A dial-up or serial terminal with various file transfer/conversion modes.
Last year was more than the end of a decade — it was the end of an era as well. Red Ryder, the shareware legend, ceased to exist at the end of 1989 — the victim of lawyers, licensing fees, and other grinches. Red Ryder had quite a good run, growing from a simple BASIC program into the Swiss army knife of telecommunications software, making it all the way from shareware version 1.0 to the commercial version 10.3 before its demise.
But although the name may be gone, the soul of the software lives on in While Knight, perhaps the first program to have its first version be numbered 11 (the numbering scheme carries over from Red Ryder), White Knight has the same low overhead and low price as its predecessor, and the plain white manual cover makes White Knight look like generic communications software (although the new colored box somewhat spoils the effect).
WHATS NEW White Knight is a complete rewrite of Red Ryder, with many major changes as well as the usual bug fixes and minor enhancements. It also comes with an all-new 270-page manual that has two indexes.
The biggest change is the addition of a facility, similar to HyperCard's XCMDs, called RCMD. RCMDs are code resources written in programming languages such as C or Pascal that extend White Knight's capabilities. Several sample RCMDs come with the package, including one that supports CompuServe's Quick B protocol, and more will be available in White Knight's support roundtable on GEnie.
Even if you are not a programmer capable of creating an RCMD, you'll appreciate White Knight's procedural language, which has been extended to let you create detailed scripts. The Write a Procedure for Me command records your actions, so you don’t even have to understand the scripting language to write a procedure. For simpler tasks, White Knight offers macro keys, which can he accessed from a separate window as well as from the status bar and can also be used to invoke procedures and RCMDs. White Knight’s Host mode, which lets you use the program as a miniature bulletin-board system for transferring messages and files, has been expanded as well with new commands, three levels of password support, and MultiFinder compatibility. Among the hundreds of less noticeable changes from and enhancements of Red Ryder, White Knight now supports color and remains one of the only communications programs that supports multiple fonts. White Knight’s menus have been rearranged — hierarchical menus now group related commands. You can access submenu items by using a unique method of typing two keys while holding down he Command key. The size and position of most windows are now remembered from session to session, and dialog boxes are now centered. Printing support has been improved, throughput has been increased, VT102 emulation has been added, and even MultiFinder support has been improved. White Knight now recognizes all Apple keyboards, so the Install Special Keys utility is necessary only for non-Apple keyboards.
White Knight expands on available file-transfer options as well. Text captures can be appended to existing files, and capturing can be suspended temporarily without closing and reopening of the captured file.
For protocol transfers, White Knight supports XMODEM (Checksum, CRC,1K, and aak-ahead); YMODEM (standard, 1K, and G): Kermit (standard, long packet, and sliding window); ZMODEM; and Flash, a new high-speed low-overhead protocol for use with error-correcting modems. The CompuServe B protocol has been dropped, but the newer Quick B protocol is available as an RCMD. White Knight supports three “filters" for the terminal window, text transfers, and protocol transfers. As characters arc received, the filters can pass them through unchanged, strip them out, or remap them to other characters.
As if this weren't enough, programmer Scott Watson has thrown in an extra added attraction, Okyto, for a limited time (the offer may be withdrawn by the time you read this; check with FreeSoft). Okyto is a special-purpose program that has one mission: to talk to other copies of Okyto, either via a modem or over AppleTalk. Like the old shareware program MCS (see Bobker's Dozen, February '90), Okyto lets you send and receive files as well as type conversational messages all at the same time, and you can even look through the directories of the remote system simultaneously (assuming you know the passwords to get access), Okyto is intended to simplify Mac-to-Mac transfers so you don’t need to learn While Knight or experiment with different options to send a file from one Mac to another. You just run Okyto and tell it which files to send or receive. If you have a high-speed (9,600-bps or more) modem, you'll have to use special initialization strings to get Okyto to function, so for those modems if s not quite as easy to use.
THE BOTTOM LINE White Knight is one of the best values in communications software, and with Okyto thrown in (a $39.95 value when purchased separately), it's an even better bargain. Yes, White Knight can be confusing and even overwhelming to a novice, but the new manual tries to make it easier to learn, and with Okyto even novices can quickly be sharing files with friends and coworkers. And yes, White Knight’s interface is unattractive when compared with its competition, but it is functional and people seem to like the program, warts and all. There are too many satisifed Red Ryder users to ignore, and White Knight continues the tradition of supporting every possible feature that its users could want and then some — and with RCMDs you can add features even Scott Watson couldn't think of.
Wiggins, Robert R. (May 1990). White Knight. MacUser. (pgs. 106, 110).
Scott Watson
Applications
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9 / 
2020-04-03 / 
2020-04-03 / 
6fe149c2c783b714314f02237948f3fb621ba762 / 
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WhiteKnight11.10.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
