There are some substantial changes with this release of Telnet. While all of these changes are described fully in the documentation, they are worthy of another mention here. If you do not already have the Telnet 2.5 documentation, please get it from
anonymous ftp from: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu
NCSA/MacTCP drivers
NCSA Telnet previously came in two versions: NCSA driver version, and MacTCP driver version. However, in this release of Telnet, the two versions have been merged into one application. This allows greater flexibility, along with removing the need to have two different applications for basically the same program. You may select the NCSA drivers, by appropriately setting the hardware= line in config.tel to ether, or atalk.
To select the MacTCP drivers, you may set hardware=mactcp in the config.tel file. Also, since Telnet defaults to MacTCP, if there is no hardware=mactcp line, Telnet will still assume that MacTCP is to be used.
Serial Connections
Telnet now has the ability to connect through the serial port, and can also optionally use SLIP. For more information about this, please see the documentation.
Remap Option to Control
The Remap Option to Control feature is not supported by System 7.0 in any useable form. Therefore, this feature is not allowed at all under system 7.0.
Forcesave
There are several new keywords that can be used in the config.tel file, one of which is the forcesave=y option. There has previously been problems with Telnet not saving information correctly in the scrollback, if used with various VMS full-screen environments such as DEC All-In-One. With option enabled, Telnet will always be forced to save the text in the scrollback buffer, so that mail will be saved. However, this feature is for use ONLY with the DEC All-In-One package, and is not intended in any way for anything else. If used for other applications, there might be rather strange effects with text being saved in the scroll back buffer. For that reason this option is defaulted to a value of "n", and is only intended to be changed by users of the DEC package.
FTP Client
Telnet now comes equipped with a primitive FTP client, which is the same one as was previously used in the BYU variant of Telnet. Use this exactly like you would normally use an FTP session, except for one difference: you must log in manually before any work can be done. Do this by specifying the following information:
user name RETURN
When prompted for a password, just type in your normal password. For more information about this, please see Chapter 5, "File Transfer" and the section about the FTP Client in particular.
Text Capture
Another long awaited feature is the ability to save the text of a session into a file. You can change the name of the file in Telnet, but Telnet will always append a unique number to the end of the file. That allows multiple sessions to be saved at the same time, without having several different file names. Please see the Telnet documentation, Chapter 3, "Customizing the Environment."
VT200 Emulation
Telnet 2.5 allow VT200 emulation. For information about various escape sequences that Telnet uses for this emulation, please see Appendix E, "VT200 Escape Codes."
System KCHR
Normally all keys are mapped from the applications KCHR, but this option allows keys to be mapped from the System KCHR. That allows applications to use the same key mappings between them, instead of all applications having their own separate key mapping. This is useful for users in foreign countries who just want to be able to change the KCHR in the system file, and have all other applications use that mapping. If you are not planning making different keyboard mappings, then this option should be turned off, and should not concern you.
