Gregory's ServerThanks to the internet-history mailing list, today I learned about the Kermit protocol, which was an extremely efficient protocol for moving bits over serial connections, popular in the early 80s
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     @darius all these folks raving for Zmodem - yes it was better, it also didn't exist till a few years later. I contributed to a few Kermit projects, porting Kermit65 from Apple ][ to Atari 800, hacking on MS-DOS Kermit, porting C-Kermit to Atari ST. And later porting Zmodem to ST as well. But we got TCP/IP over serial lines (Using MIT SL/FP, not SLIP) and I ported the KA9Q stack to my ST and left Kermit & Zmodem behind. Ftp ftw!  @darius I seem to recall that not only was it efficient, but that it sometimes worked when other methods wouldn't due to noisy connections. But it's been a while... @cstanhope yeah that seems to agree with some of the chatter I saw about it on the mailing list  @darius love this detail: > The correctness of the Kermit protocol has been verified with formal methods. good times    @darius Kermit is still relevant! You may not have Internet but if you can open a terminal to a host, you can transfer files to it.  @darius We used it in undergrad because we didn't have Ethernet in the dorms yet, just serial concentrators. That said, I always preferred Zmodem. Great for resuming interrupted transfers.  @darius particularly it ran on everything; I used to use it to send files from turbodos (CP/M clone, ish) to MIT Multics and TOPS-20 systems  @shatter I learned it from guys who consider the BBS a technology that was popular with people 20 years younger than them @darius I was pretty deep into bbs's 87 to around 99 when I finally took my board down. A lot of good times and lifelong friends. We mostly used xmodem for transfers. It was pretty much standard. Kermit was there but it was like why use something different if it works. There was a whole stack of life protocols. Xmodem, ymodem, xmodem crc, etc.  @darius I wouldn't call Kermit "efficient"! It was certainly versatile and portable, but was among the slowest protocols commonly available on 8-bit micros of the 1980s. @Logological that does not track with what I read of it and what its fans (and believe me it has fans) say even today @darius Could be that it was the implementations that were slow, or that the protocol's default configurations were not so efficient. But as an avid BBSer, I can personally attest that protocols like Punter or YMODEM were always *much* faster on my 1980s machines. |
@darius Every piece of BBS software I used in the 90s supported this as one of the data transfer options alongside XMODEM/ZMODEM/etc and I always stared baffled trying to figure out what it was. To make matters more confusing the program would often accompany it by an icon of Kermit the Frog