Zmodem was the first big leap forward. Interesting how efficiency is baked into the brains of so many folks who used to have to think about every byte they might transmit or receive.
ZMODEM
91–100 of 103 posts
Re: ZMODEM
#92Ah, the good old days. I ran a BBS in Sweden with ProBoard. Anyone else used that for BBS'es here?
C-Net in the C64 days, then WWIV when I switched to PC clones in 1990. Both platforms had full source code available. It's where I cut my teeth.
Re: ZMODEM
#93I had a small "brush with greatness" in ... ~1984, or so? I was on Compuserve at 1200 baud, and although I forget the circumstance, I had a cserve "chat" with Ward Christensen; the inventor of Xmodem. I can't even remember what we talked about, but he was surprised that I knew who he was just by his name.
Re: ZMODEM
#94When modeming into the university unix system, I really enjoyed being able to type `sz file` and bam the file is on my local machine, with progress meter and everything.
So I wrote rzh, "receive zmodem here". Navigate to where you want to receive files, run rzh (which gives you a subshell) then ssh anywhere. Bounce through six machines if you want. When you sz a file, rzh will receive it.
https://github.com/bronson/rzh
Haven't touched it much in a decade, alas.
Re: ZMODEM
#95> 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!
There were a bunch of different something-Modems around that time that fiddled around with window sizes, retransmission approaches, batch transmission, and so forth. In case anyone is wondering, there was a YModem (also developed by Forsberg) in addition to XModem and ZModem along with various variants. I even interned for a small company one summer that implemented one of these for a timesharing service using Prime…
YModem-ga FTW!
Re: ZMODEM
#96Surprised nobody mentioned BiModem in the comments (popular at least in Europe). Simultaneous up- and downloads, which was great to get keep those up/down ratios at their proper levels.
I remember it in the US, but I can't remember how widespread it was.
Re: ZMODEM
#97> 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 got my first modem in 1990 or thereabouts. For some reason there was still a lot of XModem use back then, but it was gradually replaced by ZModem. Some years later, just before BBSes were obsoleted by the internet, several multiplexing protocols appeared which let you chat or play a MUD while downloading or even upload and download at the same time. Can't remember any names, but these protocols were only popular fo…
There are still BBSes surviving today accessible via telnet. You can still go play LORD, MajorMUD, TW2K...
Re: ZMODEM
#98Looking b ack at stuff like Zmodem, it's instructive to compare the computing culture then and now. Back then, everything was so cryptic . Documentation was hard to find printed books, code and config was extremely abbreviated ( sometimes for legitimate technical reasons of storage capacity). It was all very off-putting unless you put w lot of effort into research, or ran in the social circles that already had data a…
Another thing is that once you logged onto a bbs, that is what you would be doing until you logged off.
These days my computer is logged onto a number of computers via various protocols all at the same time (especially if you torture the idea a bit and consider each web site open an anonymous login).
Re: ZMODEM
#99Surprised nobody mentioned BiModem in the comments (popular at least in Europe). Simultaneous up- and downloads, which was great to get keep those up/down ratios at their proper levels.
I loved BiModem. I used it to transfer files in both directions simultaneously while also chatting with the remote party. Very cool for the time.
Re: ZMODEM
#100All the cool kids used SModem, which allowed for downloading and chatting at the same time!
Neat - I thought BiModem was the only one that supported that!