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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

#21

Post by jgoerzen »

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 as a file transfer protocol, in the more modern implementations at least, supports 4K and 9K blocks, streaming mode (no need for ACKs), sliding windows, etc. As a protocol, it also has an OS-agnostic way to do file management; you can send commands like delete, rename, copy, etc. and the remote end does it in a general way. It's like SFTP, only a few decades earlier.

In modern times, I use it as a powerful ssh wrapper and BBS client. Its character-set translation is ideal for CP437 to UTF8. See https://www.openkermit.org/ckermit/ssh/ and https://www.openkermit.org/ckermit/bbs/

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

#22

Post by jgoerzen »

rickydroll wrote: post #13

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.

I had never heard of CGOS, but this is still up on the Kermit archive! https://kermitproject.org/archive.html Are you Val? Looks like you had to add some hacks to deal with long file naming conventions on CGOS but short filenames on CP/M.

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

#23

Post by jgoerzen »

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…

The very oldest (early 80s) Kermit implementations were limited to 96-byte packets. Kermit gained support for 4K and 9K jumbo frames, sliding windows, etc., and was generally faster than ZModem -- when there was a modern implementation. But a lot of BBSs (and also client-side communication software) did their own from-scratch Kermit implementation, which was tiny packets and no sliding windows, so it was slow. There's some discussion of it here: https://www.kermitproject.org/misconceptions.html#notslow

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

#24

Post by jgoerzen »

jmclnx wrote: post #4

Nice and congratulations Ages a ago I used it on Coherent OS via dial up to sign into a Sun Server at work that I used for USENET and general internet access. When I dialed in the server would hang up and call be back so I would avoid Long Distance Charges. ckermit handled that itself, fun times. I purchased the book to help with the project, I should go and dig it out :)

It (or rather, they, as there are a number of Kermit books) is pretty good. I've got a few on my bookshelf. OK, I'll admit, more Kermit and UUCP books than I probably need, but oh well. The Kermit books are mostly available online now also: https://www.kermitproject.org/booksonline.html

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

#25

Post by jandrese »

jgoerzen wrote: post #23
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…

The very oldest (early 80s) Kermit implementations were limited to 96-byte packets. Kermit gained support for 4K and 9K jumbo frames, sliding windows, etc., and was generally faster than ZModem -- when there was a modern implementation. But a lot of BBSs (and also client-side communication software) did their own from-scratch Kermit implementation, which was tiny packets and no sliding windows, so it was slow. There'…

This is what I remember. Kermit hated latency, and dial up modems had that in spades. It was much slower than Z-Modem for pushing files around.

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

#26

Post by rickydroll »

jgoerzen wrote: post #22
rickydroll wrote: post #13

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.

I had never heard of CGOS, but this is still up on the Kermit archive! https://kermitproject.org/archive.html Are you Val? Looks like you had to add some hacks to deal with long file naming conventions on CGOS but short filenames on CP/M.

I honestly don't remember. It took me a moment to even get back to TPL, a variation on RATFOR. I don't remember anything about the BYU conversion. That must have happened after I left CV.

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

#27

Post by jonathaneunice »

I complied Kermit for IBM's AIX in ~1989 as a study in "how compatible is AIX to other Unixes?" Kermit source code remains the high-water mark in my memory for how many different, incompatible, non-standard platforms one piece of software can support. More than even Unix itself, as it could also run on VMS and non-Unixes of the time. I have never in my life seen so many `#ifdef`s and such complicated "Am I running on this platform or that one? Does it have this feature or that feature? No, what about this other one? Is it HP-UX maybe? HP-UX 6? No, 7? No, 8? No, what about VMS? No, how about SunOS? No, how about Unix System III?" ...on and on, seemingly endlessly.

Kermit was an extraordinary monument to portability in an era when "portable" often meant "we have individually accommodated every incompatible system anyone has ever built or might possibly still be using, however improbably."

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

#28

Post by Neywiny »

jonathaneunice wrote: post #27

I complied Kermit for IBM's AIX in ~1989 as a study in "how compatible is AIX to other Unixes?" Kermit source code remains the high-water mark in my memory for how many different, incompatible, non-standard platforms one piece of software can support. More than even Unix itself, as it could also run on VMS and non-Unixes of the time. I have never in my life seen so many `#ifdef`s and such complicated "Am I running on…

Which is interesting because most autoconf programs I've seen do the opposite. They have all these defines and then don't use them. Just seems like a waste of time. Cmake has been better but still sometimes cmake will pass and the code still doesn't build
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