This document lists some of the changes in paKet 6 over paKet 5. The items are not listed in any particular order. It has been difficult to prepare this list because there has been continual change, development and refinement over the past two or more years since paKet 5 was released. However a quick review of the paKet 5 Manual has helped me to produce the following brief summary of some of the changes. The paKet Manual is now 350 pages. The entire Manual has been revised. While a few sections remain intact, most of the Manual has been revised to cover the new version. The Introductory section has been expanded too, and the Scripts Section has been fully rewritten in a Tutorial format. The PMS (Personal Message System) has been completely rewritten. It now includes Auto Forwarding to/from the BBS using the standard MBL/RLI conventions. There are now 10 TNC Help Files included (for the following TNCs): DSP-12, KAM, KPC-3, MFJ-1278, PTC (PacComm PacTOR Controller), PK-232, PK-88, TNC-1, TNC-2, TNC-231 (release 2.31 firmware). A new Online Configuration Help facility provides some additional information for the paKet operator while using paKet's Online Configuration. For each item in the configuration, a small window will pop up offering some help and suggestions for that item. This feature can be turned off if desired. In addition to the Word Wrap that proved popular with paKet 5 and is now considered an essential feature of any communications software, paKet 6 now supports Justified Text as well. This provides an aligned right hand margin such as you see here in this paragraph. This style is popular with some people and may be toggled on or off during a paKet session. The Online Manual and TNC Help Files now load significantly faster, especially on an older, slower machine. There is a Morse Code option in paKet 6 to uniquely identify different Alerts strings. So if you are using the Alerts facility to alert you to the presence of a particular string of text and one of the specified strings is detected, paKet can make a unique sound to identify not only the fact that an Alert has occurred, but now it can identify WHICH alert string was detected! (Very useful if paKet is running as a background task under Windows or OS/2). There has been a lot of attention to Scripts in paKet 6. There are several new Commands and the Scripts section of the manual has been comnpletely rewritten in a tutorial format. A new Quiet Mode is available at the touch of a key to silence all paKet sounds, including incoming beeps and warning bells. paKet 6 includes a Serial Number Registration scheme so registered users can be readily identified. However I am pleased to advise that there is no form of copy protection at all and unregistered users will still have access to the full paKet facilities while evaluating the software. The Flashback Dump facility of paKet 5 has been further enhanced and now allows selective, partial dump of the Flashback Buffer. There is improved support for Kantronics TNCs including dual port operation. There is a user programmable KISS OFF sequence to reset TNC for normal operations after some other software has left the TNC in KISS Mode. A new "Pass Control Codes" facility has been introduced especially to provide for more convenient transmission of Control Chars (eg: ) which are often used in TCP/IP operations. Keyboard Macros and Script texts now support substitution parameters (eg $T for current time or $D for today's date) Message duration is now user configurable as some paKet users asked for longer display times and some asked for shorter times! New keyboard commands: to manually initiate a Forwarding session with our BBS. to get and redisplay the previous message that was displayed. (yawn) to add a half second delay to various command texts such as Keyboard macros or Script command strings. New Remote command that allows a Remote user to Perform selected Scripts on your paKet system. Contest Mode has been removed in paKet 6. It appears very few people were using this Mode and I finally decided the overheads in memory and support effort were too much!