ICE.TEN and ICE.OFF.SITE

© September 1999 Tony Lawrence

At one time, this was a recommended product, but the pricing has not kept pace with their competition. You can now get equivalent features for one quarter of the cost of this product.(Dec 2007).

James River has been making terminal emulators for many years. Unlike some competing products such as Procomm which try to be everything to everyone and therefore end up confusing and intimidating, ICE provides a simple product that does serial or modem terminal emulation, and keeps their TCP/IP product (ICE.TCP) totally separate. The serial product does include file transfer.

The major difference between ICE.TEN and ICE.OFF.SITE is licensing: ICETEN (retail $395.00) is licensed for one UNIX host and unlimited PC's at the same physical location. ICE.OFF.SITE (retail $125.00) is licensed for a single PC, and also includes a Host Dialing module that is not included in the ICE.TEN software. Other than that, the two products are identical.

If you have older versions of ICE.TEN, you can get an upgrade price. The additional features are worth the cost.

Either product installs easily on Windows and configuration should be very obvious and simple for anyone who has done this sort of thing before. If you have not, however, the included manual is very detailed, and includes good trouble shooting sections.

Where ICE really shines over competitive products is in a typical SCO environment. You can have perfect SCO console emulation (two models included: one for the old Xenix and early Unix ansi, and one for the more current features). It also includes Wyse-60 and Wyse-160 (both very common in SCO installations) ans all the others you would expect with any terminal emulation product.

The current product includes a programmable command bar which lets you definelabeled buttons that will send predefined strings. This is handy for boilerplate and is easy enough to configure that you'd use it anytime you find yourself typing something repeatedly. There's also full cut and paste support to and from Windows programs.

ICE can scroll back up to six screens (depending on font and video resolution). You can set foreground and background colors, redefine the keyboard, print the current screen, and copy files to and from the Unix host (ICE ucopy software must be installed on the SCO server). With ICE.OFF.SITE, you can also setup a dialing hosts file for multiple hosts, defining separate terminal types for each one.

ICE supports mscreen virtual terminals also, but if you really want that feature, I'd strongly recommend Facetterm instead. ICE will work quite happily with that, too.

James River also makes ICE.TCP, ICE.NFS and a VPN product.

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