The tutorial describes a number of commands like this: M-<chr>, and says the “M-” means to “hold the META or EDIT or ALT key down while typing” the other character, and says that if you don't have a META, EDIT, or ALT key that you can type (and release) the Escape key instead.

It's worth noting that you may, indeed, have some of those keys on your keyboard, but your ssh/telnet program may not pass them on. Some telnet programs may jsut ignore those keys. In other cases (especially the ALT keys), the Windows operating system may be jealously seizing upon those keys for its own purposes. In some cases, you may have 2 ALT keys, one on the left of the spacebar and one on the right. Sometimes one of these will work and the other will not, so try them both. But if nothing else works, the Escape key will always be there for you. (If you change ssh programs, though, or if you start using X to connect as we will learn later, you might want to check out those keys once again.)