3. ON-LINE ACTIVITIES

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This section takes you through the functions most commonly used
while on-line. It starts with a look at terminal mode, the center of
your on-line activities. It then explains how to set up the dialing
directory, how to use the buffer to capture text, and how to transfer
files (upload and download).

3.1 Exploring terminal mode

Terminal mode is where you intereact with a computer on the other end
of your modem. The entire screen is dedicated to displaying text. In
terminal mode, anything you type on the keyboard is sent to your
modem, and the data received by your modem from the other
computer is displayed as it arrives.

In terminal mode, Novaterm can display text in 40- or 80-column
mode. 40-column mode is the normal state for a Commodore 64.
Novaterm also provides an 80-column mode, where each character is
half the width of a 40-column character. See section 3.1.6, Notes on
80-column mode for more information about it.

This section covers various features of terminal mode, including the
status line, key commands, key reassignments, and terminal
emulations.

3.1.1 Terminal emulations

Terminal mode depends on the use of "terminal emulations" to
display incoming text. A terminal emulation is a special driver
(module) that interprets incoming text and displays it appropriately.

For instance, one termial emulation shipped with Novaterm is called
"ANSI". ANSI is the name of a commonly used emulation where
certain sequences of characters are used to position the cursor, change
text color, clear the screen, and do other display-related things. In
ANSI, whenever the driver receives the ESCape character, the
characters immediately following will always be some sort of special
ANSI command. Novaterm's ANSI driver knows how to interpret
these commands and take the appropriate action.

So why are they called "emulations"? In the old days, almost all
computers were big mainframes, and they had one or more dumb
terminals attached to them. These terminals interpreted certain escape
sequences in the manner described above. Today, these escape
sequence commands have been adopted by the on-line community.