To share resources with another computer, your Mac and the other computer must first connect to each other. "Session" is a generic term for connections between computers.
The connection process is similar to a phone call; you could think of an ordinary phone conversation as a "voice session". To communicate with someone over the phone, you must dial that person's number, the other person must pick up the phone, and you must greet each other. Then you talk, and finally you say goodbye and hang up.
The same things happen when computers communicate. A session begins when one machine calls the number of another machine. The session continues through greetings and identifications, and it ends when one or both sides hangs up after the goodbyes have been said.
Some connections to other computers actually do use phone calls; the only difference is that special computer phones called "modems" are used instead of voice phones.
TOPS Terminal supports both modems and TCP/IP connections. TCP/IP is a common network protocol family that runs on all sorts of high-speed "local area networks", such as Appletalk and Ethernet, as well as "wide area networks" such as the ARPANET.
Every session has a session transcript. This is a Macintosh document which records the activity that occurs on a session. Session transcripts come up in normal Mac document windows.
You can give commands and express preferences which control the behavior of the session transcript, such as whether lines are saved for later viewing with the scroll bar, and whether the transcript should be saved to disk.
