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Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

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Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#11

Post by roryirvine »

rwmj wrote: post #7
voakbasda wrote: post #5

I am a gray beard and still use Kermit regularly for embedded development. It’s very handy for automating things over a serial port console. I wonder how much adoption it sees with the younger crowd.

I remember back in the day Kermit was pretty heavyweight. We used sz/rz for file transfer [z-modem: good to see the man pages are still up! https://linux.die.net/man/1/sz ]. Is there a reason to prefer Kermit?

Kermit initially competed with xmodem which was very primitive (but a lot smaller/simpler).

By the time zmodem became popular, the biggest remaining selling point of Kermit was the built-in scripting. Not much use for one-off BBS-style transfers, but very handy for keeping a directory in sync etc.

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#12

Post by dazhbog »

voakbasda wrote: post #5

I am a gray beard and still use Kermit regularly for embedded development. It’s very handy for automating things over a serial port console. I wonder how much adoption it sees with the younger crowd.

Can you elaborate more on how you use it or do you recommend any codebase to learn more?

I remember evaluating Kermit and ymodem for my embedded work too, but didn't end up using them. Maybe I didn't understand Kermit fully. I wanted something to connect over serial (usb cdc and ble) via the browser and manage files and the state of the device.

I always end up writing something worse and half-baked in the end..

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#13

Post by rickydroll »

Good Lord. That takes me back. I ported Kermit to the Computervision CGOS environment. It was very popular in the user community. Internally, it was used to transfer files between systems over the terminal concentrator when you didn't want to walk down to the machine room, scavenge a mag tape, and put up with FUTIL.

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#14

Post by aantix »

I had an Apple 2+ back in 1992. It was an old computer, even then.

The Apple 2+ only supported displaying capital letters.

I remember calling a few local BBSes using terminal software that let me press the right arrow (I think) and the character key, and it would display the character inverted (white background, black letter).

Hayes 1200 baud serial modem (I think) hooked up to a serial card.

That's how I knew I was sending a capital letter.

Not sure if it was Kermit though..

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#15

Post by kstrauser »

Why wasn’t Kermit used by BBSes? Even at the time I remember having read about it in computer magazines, but I got my first modem in ‘82 or so and I don’t recall ever seeing it in the wild. My first actual contact with it was uploading firmware I wrote to an embedded controller. But the thing it was actually designed for? Not even once.

So… why? We didn’t collectively settle on YMODEM and ZMODEM until many years later. There were lots of early protocols to choose from back then, too. Punter, anyone? No Kermit, though.

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#16

Post by ButlerianJihad »

voakbasda wrote: post #5

I am a gray beard and still use Kermit regularly for embedded development. It’s very handy for automating things over a serial port console. I wonder how much adoption it sees with the younger crowd.

I used Telix under IBM PC-DOS for scripting. The SLT scripts were as versatile as Expect or Tcl in that day.

I used MS-Kermit as a terminal emulator on the same system. I was accessing academic Unix systems and probably also remote access at my first job. MS-Kermit had a keycode translation capability that I used extensively.

My 2400/MNP5 modem sometimes only had a 7-bit connection. Without being 8-bit clean, I couldn’t directly use the Meta key with GNU Emacs. But sometimes I did achieve an 8-N-1 clean connection in the same modem pool!

So I wrote up two large tables for MS-Kermit: one for the 7-bit connection that would send ESC to simulate Meta for Emacs. And one for 8-bit-clean operation that used ALT as Meta and sent the ASCII code >=128.

I eventually submitted them to the GNU Emacs project and one was distributed with Emacs 18. Eventually, they were forced to remove it during a copyright/license cleanup audit. But it was my claim to 15 minutes of fame.

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#17

Post by compiler-guy »

kstrauser wrote: post #15

Why wasn’t Kermit used by BBSes? Even at the time I remember having read about it in computer magazines, but I got my first modem in ‘82 or so and I don’t recall ever seeing it in the wild. My first actual contact with it was uploading firmware I wrote to an embedded controller. But the thing it was actually designed for? Not even once. So… why? We didn’t collectively settle on YMODEM and ZMODEM until many years late…

Kermit had licensing issues in those days. And many bbs were focused on one specific system so many of the auto translate and nice compatibility features of Kermit weren’t that important.

And finally Kermit didn’t have great defaults especially compared to ymodem and zmodem. So getting good performance out of Kermit was much harder than the others.

All of that added up to much lower adoption outside of the mainframe world.

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#18

Post by chipotle_coyote »

I remember mostly ignoring Kermit back in my BBSing days; by the time "SuperKermit" came along, which could get performance competitive with ZMODEM, it alreayd seemed ancient.

Then, around 1991, a friend gave me access to his college Unix account so I could play with Gopher, Archie, and TinyFugue (the world of MUDs/MUCKs/etc.). The catch: to get to his account from my home machine, I had to call into a Florida state network that let you dial in and connect to machines on various college campuses. The network ran on some IBM minicomputer. And, it didn't connect to the Unix machine, oh no. It connected to a VAX, which was then on the same local network as the Unix machine.

So I had to dial in to the IBM machine, connect from it to a VAX, and then telnet from the VAX to the Unix box.

Incredibly, this all worked with only mildly annoying lag...but then I tried to transfer a file from the Unix machine to my personal machine. ZMODEM didn't work. XMODEM didn't work. I think I tried one or two other things that I've forgotten.

Then I remembered Kermit, and its reputation for being able to handle difficult connections. It got the file through on its first try.

Re: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

#19

Post by _JamesA_ »

kstrauser wrote: post #15

Why wasn’t Kermit used by BBSes? Even at the time I remember having read about it in computer magazines, but I got my first modem in ‘82 or so and I don’t recall ever seeing it in the wild. My first actual contact with it was uploading firmware I wrote to an embedded controller. But the thing it was actually designed for? Not even once. So… why? We didn’t collectively settle on YMODEM and ZMODEM until many years late…

GOO. I remember Punter well.
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