You won't get the 1980s experience without busy signals, mom telling you to get off the phone with your computer, and sysops who demand upload/download ratios.
My father was an engineer and I guess saw the value in uninterrupted Internet. We had three phone lines in our home..maybe we should have just gone with ISDN now that I think about it.
ISDN was a huge PITA to get to a residence. It took months to get installed; I think there was one person in California who actually did the installations.
I later moved from one apartment to another in the complex; it would have taken Stan another 6 months to move the service from one address to another so I just opened up the phone panel (wasn't locked) and moved the wires -- there was a 1 week period where I was paying rent on both...
There was an 800 number in the panel "contact us if changing this so we can update the 911 database" I called it, explained what I did and that was that. Maybe; I kept getting billed, I kept the service, the billing info went to the right address; I never did call for emergency services to see if they'd show up.
ISDN was certainly nice, though. Ah, the 90s, what a time to be alive.
In 1989, I managed to persuade UIC to let me borrow a terminal and 1200bd(!) modem so I could connect to their IBM system from home. I remember how inconvenient it was to lug that terminal home by public transit. I ordered a dedicated phone line for it and it was a shame that I had 749-7491 as a number that nobody would ever call (and that I gave up when I returned to California in August).
One of my useless skills back then was being able to recognize modem speeds, brand and sometimes (especially Motorolas and USRs) model just from the handshake noises they made.
For a little while, I could recognize my old man's BBS' individual subscribers calling in just by turning up the volume of the modem on top the 386 box...
in the days of 7-digit dialing, dialing the Compuserve access number in Watertown MA (which one used from Cambridge MA) played "camptown ladies sing this song"
Had my own line in the mid 80s. In the East Bay (SF Bay California) we had a multiline chat / gaming / etc. bbs known as Popnet. It was a base for a dozens of individuals meeting and socializing and still staying connected nearly 40 years later. This was in addition to the dozens of BBSs in the area - 925, 510, 415, etc.
Kermit was how I managed to get online for the first time.
I bought a new 8086 PC clone back in the days. Then I ordered a add-on card with a serial port and an external 300 baud modem from a store in UK (I lived in Norway, and I could not find anyone who sold this bleeding edge technology there).
Then I wrote a simple communication program, implementing parts of the Kermit protocol - probably in Turbo Pascal. This was before I got my hands on a C compiler ;)
Eventually my code started to work, and I was able to connect to a BBS and download the real Kermit application.
The BBS communities, and later Usenet, was great. We were lucky to grow up in a era where the online communities were nice and mostly welcoming places.
> We were lucky to grow up in an era where the online communities were nice and mostly welcoming places.
For real. It was a different time. Sure there were some assholes, but it seemed like a lot fewer. The tech was jankier then and you kinda needed help from others now and again, so it probably behooved you to not be a dick. That and the community was just smaller, and there were fewer of them, so burning a bridge didn’t mean there’d be another to replace it.
I would probably be doing something entirely different for a living if it weren’t for the late 90s BBS community.
I still use the Kermit client almost daily. Enterprise network gear still has serial ports (most still defaulted to 9600 baud!) and have an old laptop running MS-DOS and Kermit in my staging room to quickly configure remote access.
> This story is a winding one, beginning in 1981. Kermit is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest actively-maintained software package with an original developer still participating.
This is a bit of a philosophical question, for example, much of the (Lisp) code in current Emacs is from the 70s, but the GNU Emacs interpreter wasn't started until the mid 80s (also ... people weren't great at version control in the 70s, so there's not much actual development history).
I'm sure there are a bunch of Fortran libraries, like BLAS and LINPACK, that are still actively developed by the original developers and date back to the '70s. (Assuming one bug fix per decade counts as "actively developed".)
I use to use kermit with Coherent OS to log into the Sun System at work. It was setup to dial into work, then work would call be back and kermit would answer.
I remember using this to transfer files with BBS... zmodem was more popular but kermit could take advantage of full duplex so you could upload some files while downloading others at the same time. I had no idea it was still a thing.
I seem to remember the key benefit ZMODEM had over Kermit was the ability to restart an interrupted file transfer. This was especially useful in the days of yore when your younger sibling or mom picked up the extension causing your modem to drop its connection.
As I recall it Zmodem was more than nominally faster than Xmodem but in those days to squeeze even 5 to 10% speed improvement in speed on a 2400-14400 bps modem was huge.
The same here. My BBS time was with [xz]modem only, but as the author of the article I've used kermit for a HP48-SX too
(Love it that there is a android emulator for this calculator :-)
I was active during that time, but like programming languages now, I played with all the ul/dl protocols I could find, then. In addition to the ones you mentioned, there was also wxmodem and ymodem that saw some popularity in places.
I once had a chat on Compuserve with Ward Christensen, the inventor of xmodem. He seemed surprised that anyone recognized his name.
If you make comparisons only for "upload/download a file" versus, for example, zmodem...Kermit doesn't fare well.
Kermit is, though, more than that. One example is that it includes a scripting functionality somewhat like the once popular "Expect" package[1]. For things like interacting with a Cisco router cli, ftp servers, etc. Or, as the article mentions, "server mode[2]"...something zmodem also doesn't do.
So, for example, it was really useful "back in the day" for things like connecting to a network enabled modem bank and running batch jobs to do various things.
Readit News
I later moved from one apartment to another in the complex; it would have taken Stan another 6 months to move the service from one address to another so I just opened up the phone panel (wasn't locked) and moved the wires -- there was a 1 week period where I was paying rent on both...
There was an 800 number in the panel "contact us if changing this so we can update the 911 database" I called it, explained what I did and that was that. Maybe; I kept getting billed, I kept the service, the billing info went to the right address; I never did call for emergency services to see if they'd show up.
ISDN was certainly nice, though. Ah, the 90s, what a time to be alive.
For a little while, I could recognize my old man's BBS' individual subscribers calling in just by turning up the volume of the modem on top the 386 box...
Source: experience.
Edit - the online guide to popnet - https://archive.org/details/popnet-user-manual
Don't be a troughie!
Now, everyone's a troughie...
I bought a new 8086 PC clone back in the days. Then I ordered a add-on card with a serial port and an external 300 baud modem from a store in UK (I lived in Norway, and I could not find anyone who sold this bleeding edge technology there).
Then I wrote a simple communication program, implementing parts of the Kermit protocol - probably in Turbo Pascal. This was before I got my hands on a C compiler ;)
Eventually my code started to work, and I was able to connect to a BBS and download the real Kermit application.
The BBS communities, and later Usenet, was great. We were lucky to grow up in a era where the online communities were nice and mostly welcoming places.
For real. It was a different time. Sure there were some assholes, but it seemed like a lot fewer. The tech was jankier then and you kinda needed help from others now and again, so it probably behooved you to not be a dick. That and the community was just smaller, and there were fewer of them, so burning a bridge didn’t mean there’d be another to replace it.
I would probably be doing something entirely different for a living if it weren’t for the late 90s BBS community.
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM over SSH - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35703057 - April 2023 (107 comments)
C-Kermit Update History (since 8.0) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31459620 - May 2022 (7 comments)
Kermit – Misconceptions and Controversies (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31141417 - April 2022 (26 comments)
Ask HN: How many of you are still using Kermit (the protocol)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29662980 - Dec 2021 (6 comments)
Is This Site Secure? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22136710 - Jan 2020 (50 comments)
The Truth about Kermit News (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588274 - Aug 2019 (3 comments)
Transfer your files with Kermit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19048427 - Jan 2019 (2 comments)
Important News About the Kermit Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2421884 - April 2011 (1 comment)
Boots in seconds :)
This is a bit of a philosophical question, for example, much of the (Lisp) code in current Emacs is from the 70s, but the GNU Emacs interpreter wasn't started until the mid 80s (also ... people weren't great at version control in the 70s, so there's not much actual development history).
homepage: http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/
history of computing at columbia: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/
history of the genesis of kermit: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/dec20.html#kermit
writings about the 1968 protests: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/index.html
This avoided long-distant charges :)
good times, coherent info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_%28operating_system%2...
I once had a chat on Compuserve with Ward Christensen, the inventor of xmodem. He seemed surprised that anyone recognized his name.
Kermit is, though, more than that. One example is that it includes a scripting functionality somewhat like the once popular "Expect" package[1]. For things like interacting with a Cisco router cli, ftp servers, etc. Or, as the article mentions, "server mode[2]"...something zmodem also doesn't do.
So, for example, it was really useful "back in the day" for things like connecting to a network enabled modem bank and running batch jobs to do various things.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckscripts.html
[2] http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckututor.html#iksd
"Although ZModem came out a few years before Kermit had its performance optimizations, by about 1993 Kermit was on par or faster than ZModem."
I also remember using Kermit for a BBS file transfer once. Once.