101–110 of 110 posts
Still would love if desktop terminal emulators would implement the zmodem receiver side, so that you can ssh into some host of your choice and just type "sz" to copy arbitrary files of your choice onto your local system.
Kermit is still used in the embedded space, on modern platforms specifically for uboot. zmodem can also be used in embedded spaces to retrieve files if the only interface is a serial port.
This! I still recall using zmodem not that long ago for this exact purpose of sending firmware blobs over just a serial connection.
Annoyingly it still supports a maximum of 115200 baud, even though the serial port on the switch is physically USB-C, so on the one occasion we had a switch brick itself and had to use zmodem "in anger" it took quite a long time to upload the replacement firmware.
Hello! Thank you for starting me up! I'm the Kermit protocol and I'm happy to hel... wait, you want to transfer what file? What the hell is a giga byte? Well, man, OK, you're the user so you know best, but man, this is going to take like, days man, settle in, here we gooo ooooooo whooooooo OOOOOOOOO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!!!!!!!!1!! qcjqrjrcorRC!!! WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT? Did I just do megabytes per second ? Holy shit. A…
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:…
Funny part about Elite is that they supposedly limited the number of galaxies to maintain the illusion that it was manually created instead of built at runtime using a pseudo random number generator with a preselected seed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:…
What's in that initrd. Surely busybox doesn't take up 14M.
Busybox is 521K and udevadm is 572K. ext4.ko is 2.4M and libsystemd-shared-253.3-3.so is 3.5M. usr/lib has quite a lot of file in it eg libc.so.6 at 1.9M.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:…
Elite on the C64 did not have filled polygons. It had hidden line removal. Still impressive. Funny part about Elite is that they supposedly limited the number of galaxies to maintain the illusion that it was manually created instead of built at runtime using a pseudo random number generator with a preselected seed.
You are correct - I was conflating it with the later PC effort. When you get to my age (etc).
Sadly, nowadays the plain text of the legalese bollocks that you don't even realise you've signed up to is larger than entire games of yesteryear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
edit: this thread has some more info https://groups.google.com/g/comp.dcom.modems/c/JdOtiDGCV3Y
There's one person in the thread who is skeptical that Bo was in the wrong!
At my last job, I worked in the PCI cardholder data environment, and we were very careful to limit egress from our systems in order to make it hard to exfiltrate data in the unlikely event of a breach. I remember thinking, if I were a wily hacker and I managed to pop a shell on one of these hosts, I would not be deterred by network egress roadblocks. I'd figure out a way to get `sz` on to a host and exfiltrate data t…
> I'd figure out a way to get `sz` on to a host and exfiltrate data to my heart's content with ZMODEM like we did back in the day. Probably as easy as `cat > sz` and then paste it over the wire? Maybe run through base64 first. Although actually depending on the situation you might be able to just do that directly and not bother with this? Like just as a super simple non-scientific test: $ ssh someserver cat /bin/ls >…
Here's an extreme example of such program consisting only of printable (and type-able) characters:
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ftp/a/tcomtxt.asm
(Seen on https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5202/tran... )
You can also notice the mention of bootstrap files in Kermit, and look them up.
I've recently seen some better known YouTube user doing exactly the thing we discuss on an old system (even including the consequences of accidental port setting mismatch), but, of course, can't remember the exact video.
Norton Commander, in addition to sharing files over serial or parallel port, was able to “clone” itself to another computer by sending a bootstrap loader the same way, then copying the rest. Hmm, the null modem cable pin connection chart in the readme seems to be a regular one (though without carrier detect pin), but the interlink/laplink cable is shown as 8 bit wide (though the thing should probably work with popular legacy 4 bit crossover):
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wow! I had no idea about Terminator! It would be fascinating to hear about what happened from Bo's perspective. edit: this thread has some more info https://groups.google.com/g/comp.dcom.modems/c/JdOtiDGCV3Y There's one person in the thread who is skeptical that Bo was in the wrong!