Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM over SSH

SSH has both control channels and escape codes. They could add this to the \n~? codes.

I tried to track him down a few years ago so I could register my (previously pirated) copy of terminate. I figured better late than never. But I couldn’t find him.

I recall that there were some shenanigans with the sale of the company. I think there’s some messages floating around on newsgroups and around the place about it. I found this https://paste.ee/p/Z0ywP

My Commodore 64 has a USB interface nowadays (and a few replaced caps). Originally it only had a tape "drive" ie cassette. After a few years we got a 1541 floppy disc unit. Tick, tick tick, whiirrrrrrrr (think: trilled r on speed), fut (etc). Instead of 10-15 mins to load a game it loaded in a fair few seconds. Bear in mind that the 64 refers to 64 kilobytes.

  $ ls -lh /usr/bin/cp
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 123K Apr  3 19:00 /usr/bin/cp

The copy command on this laptop is 123Kb! ls is 135K. Elite on the C-64 has filled 3D polygonal space ships, space stations and stuff, a whopper of a galaxy and a HUD that gives you an excellent idea of what is where in 3D. You get a trading system and ship upgrades etc. Oh and music - The Blue Danube should play when one is docking with a space station. Obviously you'll need a driver for the joystick and keyboard too. You don't get the whole 64Kb to play with either - a fair bit of that is used by the system itself.

Before the C64 I used a ZX81 and before that a ZX80 - they had roughly 1 kilobyte of RAM. The ZX81 had a RAM pack upgrade which added 16Kb. It was a bit wobbly and required a strip of Bluetac to stop it crashing the computer when nudged. An uncle of mine calls "bloody luxury" on that - he learned programming with punched cards - probably ForTran.

This laptop's kernel is 12M and initramfs is 14M and a fallback image of 70M. Add to that a microcode image (7M).

You'll be glad to hear that Kermit weighs in at a svelte 26K (I've just installed it from the Arch AUR)

Interesting. Thanks for the link. I remember using a Russian clone called “Terminator” which looked way more polished than Terminate, but don’t know if it’s related to this controversy.

EDIT: Oh! I found it and installed it from https://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=3&l= . Apparently, Terminator isn't a Russian clone like I remembered, but actually the successor to Terminate written by George Collins.

How I contributed to Emacs

Once when I should've been in college still, I was using the Telix terminal program on a 286 with a 2400MNP5 modem. Now Telix had a really awesome scripting language that could do all sorts of terminal magic, but that's a story for another day.

My connection to the Internet was 8-bit clean, and at the time I was an avid Emacs user/evangelist. (Since then, I have seen the light of vim's face and have never turned away.)

I saw that Emacs included a mapping file for mskermit to generate ESC sequences for Alt+Keypress, and I figured out that if I mapped each scancode for Alt+Keypress to the appropriate 8-bit code, it would convert my Alt key into a Meta buckybit, perfect for Emacs usage!

So I painstakingly mapped out each scancode and transcribed it into the ms-kermit configuration, and before long I was Emacsing in all its 8-bit-meta-glory.

I figured it would be useful to other Emacs users, and so I sent the file upstream. Lo and behold, it was incorporated into the standard Emacs distribution, and it stayed that way for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, since I had never formally assigned copyright or done whatever legal bit needs to be done to GPL the code, TPTB did an audit of the Emacs distro and culled any code that did not have solid legal footing. At that point, ms-kermit was really obsolete anyway, so I suppose it's all for the best!