Unfortunately neither solution will work for me because telnet or ssh is just a means to log into an old bbs that only supports zmodem uploads. So you cannot open another ssh or telnet connection on this machine. All you can do is to go through the menues and start a zmodem upload to your own machine. On Linux there is zTelnet so I hoped that something similar exists for Mint.
Can he not simply log into the bbs with telnet, select the file he wants to download. Zmodem send starts on the BBS, he'll see some noise looking characters at the top of the screen. At this point suspend telnet and start rz to listen on that same tty (Don't ask me how).
?????????? Zmodem can indeed be configured to work over a telnet connection.Brian