Copyright 1995 databeast, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Portions Copyright 1986,1993 Cornell University;
Portions Copyright 1984 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PLEASE NOTE THIS DISCLAIMER: NO WARRANTEES, express or implied, are made regarding the fitness of this software for use in any application whatsoever. THE USER assumes all liability for damage to hardware, software, or data which may result from its use.
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The dataComet Telnet/terminal communication package allows you to connect to the two major types of host computer using either a TCP/IP network or serial/modem lines to make the physical connection; dataComet requires Apple's MacTCP TCP/IP driver to make Telnet TCP/IP connections. Using dataComet, you can connect to either an IBM mainframe running an operating system such as VM/CMS or MVS, which uses the EBCDIC character set, or other hosts, which usually use the ASCII character set.
See the document on "Emulators" for more information on the emulators included in dataComet.
dataComet uses dataComet documents to retain session configuration information between launches. If you create macros after launching from a document or saving a configuration, they are automatically saved in the document. The "Comet Default" document is a special document which is automatically created in your System Folder when you first launch dataComet; in addition to ordinary session configuration data which is used as a default when dataComet is launched directly or a "New..." command is used to make a new document, it also saves Global Configuration data which applies to all sessions. If you create a new document by choosing "Reconfigure Session" and changing the name, the new document will have the same attributes as the source document (other than key macros). Each new dataComet session requires about 50K of memory.
The "Documents" submenu in the Apple Menu displays the names of the documents available in the "Documents" Folder contained in dataComet's Folder. You can add documents to the Folder and they will be included in the list, so you can place frequently-used session documents and other text documents in the folder for convenient access. (This list is only updated when dataComet is launched).
dataComet offers macros which can allow the user to create scripts to execute routine operations automatically. These can be stored as text in the .edit window, or associated with a keystroke or other program states... see the document on "Macros" for more information.
dataComet supports scrollback buffers for both 3270 and ASCII emulations which preserve screen character attributes (e.g., inverted or boldface text). Each buffer will grow until memory grows short, at which point the top page of the buffer will be deleted so that new lines can be added. If you want more room for scrollback, use the Finder's "Get Info..." command to increase the size allocated for dataComet. The "Clear" menu command clears the text from the buffer. The "Find" and "Find same" commands allow you to search the buffer, and the "Print" command prints either the selection range or the current screen if no selection has been made. To avoid running into situations where you run out of memory to copy or print, you need to set the scrollback buffer size in the "Control Session..." dialog. Each line scrolled takes three times as much space to store as the length of the line, so 100 lines of an 80-column session takes 24K of memory. To help make sure you don't run out of memory, try to allocate dataComet's memory size in the Finder's "Get Info..." dialog so that when you're running all the sessions you want you have as much memory remaining as the largest buffer you've allocated.
You can open 'TEXT' windows with no associated session by holding down the Shift key when using the "New..." or "Open..." File menu commands or by dropping the documents onto the dataComet application. When documents are saved, the document's creator ID is changed to dataComet's ID, so that the next time the document is launched it will be opened by dataComet. Edit windows are TextEdit windows, and can hold up to 32K of text.
In addition, each session has a ".edit" window in addition to the window containing the emulator screen. The session name is used as the first part of the window name, with ".edit" added as a suffix. This window is provided for use as a handy text scratchpad and/or scrollback buffer which can be viewed at the same time as the emulator screen; the file contents are loaded automatically when the document is opened.
You can execute macros in edit windows by pressing the Enter key, which causes either the selection or the current line (if no selection has been made). The simplest macro is plain ASCII text, so you can easily use this feature to compose lines for Chat sessions. See "Transferring programs and text" and "Using the Edit menu" for more information on the .edit window.
dataComet supports 'GURL' AppleEvents, which allow other applications to notify dataComet that a telnet session should be opened. When dataComet receives a GURL, it opens a session to the host and places the URL specification in the sessions .edit window. If the session has been saved as a document, the document will be opened, so that the configuration and notes made on the connection in the .edit window are retained between sessions. You can use ICeTEe and Internet Config to perform Command-click URL launches from dataComet's edit windows. These are available from
<ftp://ftp.share.com/pub/internet-configuration/>
Some applications still create and launch NCSA Telnet or Brown TN3270 documents and launch them in order to open a telnet session. You can use the "dataComet-launchers" to automatically translate these documents and create a dataComet document with the same configuration. These applications also facilitate the conversion of existing NCSA or Brown documents to dataComet documents.
dataComet sessions can use fonts other than the default Comet-Font. By default, characters greater than 127 are displayed in the Comet-Font, so that you can use the emulators with alternate fonts and still have the VT100 graphics and IBM ALA character set appear correctly.
The Macintosh keyboard layout maps the some Option-key combinations into foreign characters. This can cause confusing results when using the IBM PF Option-key commands and key macros, so the "dataComet keyboard" keyboard layout is provided to ensure that Option-key combinations are not remapped. An alert appears when dataComet is launched if dataComet cannot find this resource in the System folder. You can avoid this alert by turning off the Control Global dialog item "Remap Option key-combinations". (NOTE: sometimes the installation of this resource into the System by dropping it onto the System file causes partially-corrupt System files to go over the edge to oblivion. If you are using a "foreign" character font, or don't mind Option-key combinations Option-E, I, N, U, and ~, you should probably disable "Remap Option key-combinations", which is only set as the default to ensure backward compatibility with previous versions of Comet.)
dataComet supports three different techniques for transferring files: TFTP, FT3270, and session logging. dataComet is capable of functioning as a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, so you can run TFTP on the host to connect to your workstation and transfer files. A special protocol, "FT3270," was also developed for transferring files over 7-bit connections (such as Sytek). This protocol allows the use of the same user interface for file transfer when the user's computer is connected by either the serial port or a network interface (the current Macintosh version functions only with IBM mainframes). Session logging, which you enable in the File menu, allows you to save screens from your session in a file as they are cleared.
The folder in which the session document is located is the default folder for up- and down-loading, unless "Comet Default" is the document being used, in which case the default download folder is the application's home directory. You can use the "Type file name at cursor" command in the File menu to switch folders and insert a file name at the cursor position. This command uses the standard file interface. When you create a new file by saving text or downloading a file, the file is set by default to be a TeachText document; you can cause files to be saved with a different document
