Version 1.0.1, released in October 1995, was mostly a bug-fix release. The later was useful when used with offline mail readers like Blue Wave. Two major versions followed 1.0 of April1994 was a major release that added 16-color ANSI support instead of 8-color, user-selected fonts including Shift JIS support, Kermit protocol support, and auto-opening of downloaded files. The first public version of ZTerm was 0.9, which was released in 1992. In addition to be able to run these manually, when a service was dialed using an entry in the editable Dial menu, ZTerm would look for a script with the same name and run it automatically. ZTerm added the ability to use the mouse to position the cursor, sending the correct stream of ANSI codes to move it from the current to the clicked location.įinally, ZTerm included a 10-verb built-in scripting language that allowed it to automate basic tasks. This made it one of the few terminals on the Mac that properly displayed ASCII art, and allowed full interaction with PC-based bulletin board systems (BBS) that used these features extensively. ZTerm also supported auto-starting transfers from ZModem and CIS-B, where commands from the host triggered transfers from the client.Īdditionally, ZTerm included a complete PC graphics character set and ANSI escape codes, including color. ZTerm supported one of the widest variety of file transfer protocols available on the Mac, including a full implementation of ZModem, YModem, YModem-G, almost all of the common varieties of XModem with different packet sizes and error correction methods, and even the rare but useful B protocol (CIS-B) for use on Compuserve. Even if these speeds were offered, most emulators of the era were so slow that they had trouble keeping up with faster modems, especially 9600 bit/s and faster. These features were not universally supported in Mac hardware, so many terminal emulators simply didn't bother to implement them at all. Its hardware support included carrier detect (CD), hardware hangup (DTR) and hardware flow control, as well as speeds up to 119,200 bit/s on those machines that supported it.

ZTerm was widely regarded as the best terminal program on the Mac. When it was first introduced in 1992, ZTerm was one of the highest performing terminal emulators on the Mac, both in terms of basic text display as well as file transfer performance.

Serial port emulator mac