# Foreword

Dear Tera Term user,

This topic briefly covers "Tera Term" creation and development history.

Tera Term is the terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows, that supports serial port, telnet and SSH connections. Among many other features it also has built-in Macro scripting language. Tera Term is often used to automate tasks related to remote connections initiated from PC.

Tera Term, also known by the abbreviation `TT' was created in 1994 in Japan. The original author of the Tera Term was Takashi Teranishi. He was the one who put in place the "backbone" off the application that allows to develop it further today - over decade later.

Tera Term was released as freeware and won "Online software grand prize 97" competition held by Japanese tool portal Madonomori in 1997.

Tera Term supports the plug-in mechanism allowing to create many useful extensions to the application. One of them, TTSSH, which stands for Tera Term SSH extension, is well-known to every Tera Term user. TTSSH was developed by Robert O'Callahan back in 1998 and extended Tera Term with SSH1 protocol support.

Takashi Teranishi stopped developing Tera Term in 1998. The latest version 2.3 was compatible with Windows 95 and Windows NT. Unusually for that time for Windows-based application, the source code of both Tera Term and TTSSH was open. However, distribution of Tera Term binaries still required permission from Takashi Teranishi.

Tera Term has been popular among engineers in Japan and all over the world for many years, but not being developed since 1998 it slowly started to become out of date. Tera Term got compatibility issues with the latest versions of Windows, was lacking SSH2 protocol support, etc. There were several plug-ins like IPv6 and transparency support developed by different users however they did not address all the issues and could not be distributed as new version of Tera Term as this would require permission from Teranishi san who was not easy to reach.

Finally in September 2004 group of enthusiasts from Japan was able to contact Takashi Teranishi, obtained the permissions to develop Tera Term further and to distribute it under BSD license. Few months later, in November 2004 TeraTerm Project was launched on SourceForge.jp. The project is ongoing as Tera Term succession version and is being officially recognized by the original author. The name of the project is `Tera Term'. The team of developers is from Japan. Support forum established in early 2005 is the place where Tera Term users can ask their questions, exchange ideas, share their experience working with the application, post new feature suggestions or report the bugs. Support Forum is also the place where TeraTerm Project team directly interacts with end users which benefits both sides and makes Tera Term better with every new release.

A finally, we'd like to thank all the people involved in Tera Term development starting Takashi Teranishi as well as all Tera Term users that made this application so popular worldwide. TeraTerm Project team feels increasing interest to the application and this motivates us to keep developing Tera Term further.

With very best regards,
TeraTerm Project Team

Japan - Tokyo, August 2007