Before personal computers became prevalent, terminals served as the medium for user communication with minicomputers and mainframes. Many brands of terminals were marketed, the most popular being the VT100 model manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation. Another type of terminal in frequent use was the Tektronix 4010 graphics terminal, which became the standard for displaying graphics from a minicomputer or a mainframe system.
Since a PC has a powerful processor and good graphics capability, software vendors soon discovered that by using a software program, a personal computer could be made to emulate a VT100 or Tektronix 4010 terminal. That is, the software could essentially trick the mainframe or minicomputer into believing that the PC is actually a given type of terminal, so that as far as the mainframe or minicomputer is concerned, the device it is communicating with is a terminal.
Although this emulation ability greatly increases the usefulness of a personal computer, the ``transformation'' is not entirely seamless. One problem that has been present with all PC emulation packages is that a VT100 terminal has a different style of keyboard from the one found on a PC. For the terminal emulation software to function properly, the PC keyboard must be reconfigured so that it mimics the keyboard of a VT100. This reconfiguration is often referred to as key binding.
Unfortunately, there is really no optimal way to reconfigure the PC keyboard so that each of the key functions on a VT100 terminal appears somewhere on the PC keyboard as well. Different users will have different opinions on how the PC keyboard should be reconfigured. However, one nice feature of the Kermit emulation package is that Kermit does not force the use of only one set of key bindings---instead, the Kermit key bindings can be changed as desired. Given this flexibility, Academic Computing Services has set up Kermit with key bindings that should meet the needs of most users. These bindings are documented later in this document.
It should be noted that the Kermit software distributed can emulate both a VT100 and a Tektronix 4010 graphics terminal. For most applications the VT100 emulation is what you will use; however, for displaying graphics from SAS, SPSS, or Matlab you can switch to Tektronix mode.