Commo (Terminal Emulator)

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Commo is a telecommunications program which was written and maintained from 1989 to 1998 by Fred P. Brucker. It was a macro-driven package and could be heavily customized by the user. The program, which was distributed as shareware, was small and very fast, having been written in optimized assembly language.

The macro language used by Commo was very simple, with assembly language-like statements surrounded by curly braces. It offered the ability to control most aspects of the terminal. For instance, the following macro would reconfigure the Alt-X key to display a dialog box, allowing the user to confirm before exiting the program:

 {:alx} {info-qs0 Really exit?}
        {ifco ,alxn} {exit} {:alxn} {}

All of the macro and configuration files were free-form text which could be edited with any text editor. This led to popularity amongst those who wanted to be able to heavily configure the program.

Fred Brucker actively provided support for screen readers to work with Commo, which made it a popular program for the visually impaired.

The Powermacros add-on made {COMMO} one of the first Trade Wars 2002 'helper' programs.

MacroBBS was a Bulletin board system system written entirely out of Commo macros.

Mr. Brucker released the last version of (COMMO) on 25 December 1998. It is found in commo77.zip, which can be downloaded from http://www.geocities.com/dcrife/commo77.zip.