11 Apr
2011
11 Apr
'11
12:27 p.m.
On 4/11/2011 8:46 AM, Geoff Oltmans wrote:
Does anyone in any real sense use Kermit these days?
Even back during
my bbs days Kermit was a rarely supported and/or slow protocol that
wasn't exactly a first choice. Wasn't it designed for slower packet
switched networks the likes of telenet and tymnet?
It was always an available choice back in the day for BBS's, compuserve,
etc. Zmodem was the defacto standard for anyone looking for speed.
I used it back in the day during the ummm, "network exploration" phase
of my life. Since it was installed (by default?) on many different *ix
platforms, you could always count on it being there. You could also
transfer files across 7-bit only links. Perhaps dialup into an
annex(haven't used this term in awhile), telnet into a local machine,
and then telnet through two or three other machines, and still do kermit
from my desktop to the host on the far side. Most
(all?) of the other
protocols would fail miserably. The reliability across slow
serial
connections (as others have mentioned) was a real life saver for the
type of work I was doing. :)
I used uuencode/decode and "cat >file" and ascii text upload (basically
cut/paste) when nothing was installed.
I have a funny story of calling Ward Christensen when I was about 12
years old. I had found his XMODEM g-file on a BBS some place, and was
using it to implement XMODEM in the BBS software that I was writing at
the time for the Commodore Amiga. I had understood the majority of it
except for how the checksum functioned. I had called him, I think, at
some university in Chicago and he initially berated me on the phone for
asking a simple question that was already answered in the documentation.
His tone later softened(however slightly) whenever he discovered my
young age, and told me to ask my math teacher at school to explain "modulo."
Keith