Today, most networks connect two or more computers, but it's also possible to use your computer as a remote terminal (a keyboard and screen) to operate another computer that might be located in the next room or halfway around the world. Computers using terminal emulator programs send commands from your computer's keyboard to a distant system, and they display data from the distant computer on your computer's screen. You can connect to another computer as a remote terminal through a LAN, through a dial-up telephone line, or through the Internet.

For example, Figure 2-11 shows the login sequence from a remote terminal program connected to The Well, a text-based online community that runs on a Unix host computer in Sacramento, California. The Well's computer treated my desktop computer in Seattle exactly the same as it would treat a local terminal connected directly to the host. You might see similar text-based host computer displays from library catalogs or mainframe computers.

Figure 2-11. A remote terminal allows a user to operate a remote computer through a network.

You can connect to a computer as a remote terminal through the Internet, using a category of programs called telnet that form the core of most terminal emulators, or you can connect directly to the host computer through a modem and a conventional dial-out telephone line.