21–30 of 103 posts
> Introduced 1986; 30 years ago Now I feel old. I remember when this was new and clever. Made downloading from BBS's much nicer over XModem. At 2400 baud or whatever was current then!
It was a layer over protocols like zmodem that rendered images as they downloaded. Think of that for a second. Modems were so slow that you could watch the image line by line render to decide if you wanted to continue on with the download. Yes they were porn images.
Kermit was in the same space as Zmodem. I remember it fondly, as they were very progressive around "open source" way back in the early 90's, and probably earlier. They accepted what was essentially a "pull request" over USENET discussions forums from me to add a feature. http://www.kermitproject.org/ckfaq.html
That's pretty cool, what feature did you add?
If your terminal emulator supports it, it will see the trigger sequence emitted and start the modem protocol over your ssh connection and save the file.
Since it runs over your current ssh connection it's perfectly secure.
It's so much easier then switching to a local terminal to use scp to get or put a local file. Sure, I know it's not the most efficient protocol but with the speed of todays networks the kind of files you're dealing with when doing administration or development are more quickly transferred by not having to do the context switch.
If there's a mac terminal that will do scp that has shell integration on the host. I'd switch to that, but I haven't found one. Is there?
Kermit was in the same space as Zmodem. I remember it fondly, as they were very progressive around "open source" way back in the early 90's, and probably earlier. They accepted what was essentially a "pull request" over USENET discussions forums from me to add a feature. http://www.kermitproject.org/ckfaq.html
The project was cancelled in 2011, and according to the web page it's open source now, and I think that the open sourcing didn't happen until then.
Nowadays we have an embarassment of riches of information and community and expressiveness and usability (when the APIs aren't locked down by DRM and trade secrets)
> Introduced 1986; 30 years ago Now I feel old. I remember when this was new and clever. Made downloading from BBS's much nicer over XModem. At 2400 baud or whatever was current then!
I was 12 years old. I had a 2400 baud and ZModem was the second greatest thing that year. Watching Haley's comet on my birthday would be #1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still use this today, it's what you do with an embedded device when all you have is a serial line and need to get files on/off. Slow as hell though, but then I didn't grow up with this stuff.
Screen[1] contains an implementation of zmodem (and is one of screen's advantages over tmux). I've used it before on VMs on which I had a serial console but no network connection or other way to get/put files. [1] - https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/