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.
ISDN BRI service became fairly popular during the big dialup ISP boom of the mid-to-late 90s. I worked for a tiny ISP during said boom and we would somewhat routinely (again, we were quite small; the other big local ISPs ordered 100s to 1000s of ISDN lines a year) order ISDN Centrex service - as the unlimited ISDN service offering was then called from Pacbell - for our customers. Many many ISPs sold a crapload of Ascend P50 ISDN routers. We even sold a few to some of our business customers. It worked pretty well. Once we even drove down to the Ascend offices in Alameda to get our Ascend digital modem box RMA'd.
But yes ISDN was generally quite exotic for the consumer market. Centrex service (or whatever the particular RBOC chose to call it) even moreso. It was as close as most consumers could get to "broadband" in the 90s. I used it myself at a couple places including my small apartment in Sacramento. It didn't seem too hard to get it ordered and setup. It may have helped that we knew a Pacbell tech, the dad of one of the principals at the ISP I worked at. Not sure if he helped grease the wheels but he may have. He pulled 100 pairs into an apartment where we temporarily hosted the ISP. Pretty handy guy to know back in those days and for that particular business.
Later on I've only seen ISDN in PRI form. When I later got a "real job" in an IT department PRI was commonly used for the Shoretel gear we had. I never worked on the telecom side for bigger companies though and of course almost everything went to 100% VoIP eventually.
Yeah, I somehow ended up being responsible for the college campus modem bank a bit before I got my home ISDN setup; a pair of livingston portmasters and a pair of T1s that connected them to the phone co.
One of the hardest / most confusing problems I ever had was with that stuff -- TPC gave me 2 hunt groups (one for faculty/staff the other for students). One worked fine the other just wouldn't work at all. Eventually (after turning off the "broken" one and still getting a login/PPP prompt when dialing I called TPC and asked "hey -- your docs have these 2 hunt groups -- are you _sure_ they're right?" and they'd actually given me another org's phone number for one of them and that other org also had a livingston portmaster on it. Sigh.
SDLC phone network stuff is fascinating -- "why is it all on one clock?" (synchronous data link control) -- because when it was invented it was absurd to presume you could get enough ram to buffer things for packets (ha! What's a packet?) -- it all just happens at all at once everywhere.
Another time someone dropped a backhoe on the cable trunks between the campus phone bunker and the campus; I glanced over and saw the techs patiently stitching back together the eleventy billion cable pairs between the switch and each phone on campus. 30 tons of copper later got replaced by 500 pounds of memory...
In Belgium the phone company (wholly government owned) charged an arm and a leg for ISDN BRI, so I never got one installed.
We lived far from the exchange (5km), which at first was still a rotary when my BBS went up so it wasn't even an option. I can still remember weeping with joy when it got replaced with an Alcatel System 12 cause of my new transfer speeds and reliability.
Funny thing, the rotary switch was in a building next to my high school, you could see the vertical rotaries from the street next to the main entrance.
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"
I was the Compuserve rep for Interplay back in the day, and the account number (76702,1342) will be forever burned in my memory. That account was free for some areas of CIS, but not all of it (much to the chagrin of one of producers, who ran up a $1,500 bill in one month of gaming).
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.
Ah sure. I didn't mean they were now unpopular. Just that the need for them has drawn down as many things you would automate via expect now have better api-based choices. Or have otherwise dwindled...I don't see too many modem banks around these days.
Very true, formerly command line only network devices now have APIs in some cases; the Cisco Meraki devices don't even have a CLI, only a cloud based web mgmt GUI, or a Restful API.
It was optimizable - if you had a proper Kermit client that did all the stuff ZModem did, like sliding ACK windows and larger packet sizes. After we had error-correcting modem protocols, line noise was much less of an issue.
But most Kermit protocols in terminal software implemented only the most basic version of the protocol and didn't support all the options that you needed to set.
Not sure about resuming, which was AFAICT only a ZModem thing (and the best part of it).
> I also remember using Kermit for a BBS file transfer once. Once.
Similar memory here. Wasn’t sure about the different protocols offered in Telix and I used Kermit once because the BBS offered it. Right after the sysop burst in on chat and told me not to use Kermit and only use zmodem.
That was basically what I did until HSLink came out and let me do bidirectional, chat, and play Tetris while waiting. Good times. Good memories.
Pretty much the only way to download the cool warez that you FTPd down (from some Scandinavian anonymous FTP site that displayed the warning "our transatlantic link is only 128Kbit, so Yankees please only leech at night") to your VM/CMS account. Can even be used to transfer stuff over 2400bps AX.25 hamradio channels. The 1980s equivalent of zip ties and bailing wire.
Oh that address brings back memories... ftp.funet.fi
Was my first introduction to archive, FTP, and related things. I used to visit a friend at Uni and use his higher baud rate connection, until I got my own.
That account was a shell / SLIP type, and if I wanted something bigger than my modest quota, a quick note to the sysop would see it raised and an appointment to stop by the shop with portable media.
Damn good times.
For me, the magic of the tech was one thing. So much growing in such a short time!
But the people! Man, people cared. Most of them did anyway. We all (almost all) were mentored online by peers and sysops trying hard to build something good. Honor how special and enabling it all was.
I miss that the most. Logging on to read news of the day, little signposts for all of us to see, go explore. Was nice and it made me want to do the same give back what was given to me.
I fondly remember puzzling over this option in Hyperterminal as a kid in the 90s. The web was smaller then so the features and stock programs of the OS were relatively more interesting and I spent a lot of time with them.
> Although terminal emulation has been largely supplanted by the Web for online access, Kermit software continues to play a role in other applications such as remote sensing and data collection, management and troubleshooting of networking and telecommunications equipment, back office work, cargo and inventory management, medical insurance claim submission, electronic funds transfer, and online filing of income tax returns. Kermit software is embedded in network routers and switches, in cell-phone towers, in medical diagnostic and monitoring equipment, even in cardiac pacemakers, not to mention the cash registers of quite a few big-name "big box" retailers. In 2002 Kermit flew on the International Space Station, and Kermit software is the communication method used by EM APEX ocean floats (left) supplying realtime data to hurricane researchers and trackers to this day (the hurricane project entered a new expanded phase in 2010 based on a new version of Embedded Kermit).
I had kermit beat by a year. From 1979-1980 I was a consultant and worked on several CP/M and MP/M systems. Standalone CP/M such as Vector Graphic (S-100 system) and a sweet MP/M system with Televideo terminals. In those days everyone's diskette formats were proprietary even though the CP/M base and 8080 assembler was standard. WordStar would run once you patched its terminal codes and told it the UART base port for serial printer port. But how to get it there, and the growing list of diagnostic utilities I was collecting?
In late 1979 I wrote a simple file transfer utility called MFT (multi file transfer) in 8080 assembler. It was meant to transfer over a 9600,N,8,1 or 19200,N,8,1 serial line between two computers. It sent file names over the link with the files and did full handshake 256 byte packets with checksum to do it slowly but reliably. When you wrote to diskette in those days you'd better not have any I/O happening. It supported wildcards (no directories in CP/M days)and would copy everything to the new system.
It would work but only if MFT.COM was already on the new machine. To bootstrap it I built an ASCII file consisting of CP/M debugger commands that assembled MFT.COM into memory an instruction at a time, told the debugger it was named MFT.COM, and wrote its span of memory onto the new machine's disk and exited the debugger. All I had to do was set the COM ports to something slow that both machines could handle reliably like 1200,N,8,1 and run debug on the new machine piped from COM1, and send the ASCII file with the debug sequence.
Then fire up MFT.COM and transfer everything else at 'high' speed. I ported WordStar and CP/M accounting systems and data to new machines, and handled every new Kaypro or Osborne etc. that came along. None of my customers ever had to 'repurchase' a master diskette in some proprietary CP/M diskette format.
Back in the day (the 80's) when I was a young broth-of-a-boy junior engineer we used both Kermit and BLAST[0] to move files between Data General mini's and a bunch of destinations running CP/M, PC/MS-DOS, CP/N, BBC Micros and all sorts. Good times.
> To reduce transmission overhead, the Kermit protocol uses a simple, but often surprisingly effective, compression technique: repeated byte values are represented by a count+byte combination.
> Analysis of large volumes of both textual and binary data shows an average compression of 15-20%.
This reminds me of one of my many complaints about Microsoft software.
Windows 95, 98 and XP included hyperterminal. In theory hyperterminal could send and receive files over a serial port. On a few occasions I came across a machine with a broken floppy drive or something and tried to use a null modem cable.
Hyperterminal would give up after a few hundred kilobytes, because it was programmed to do that. You had to find and transfer a less stupid piece of software then use that instead.
> Hyperterminal would give up after a few hundred kilobytes, because it was programmed to do that. You had to find and transfer a less stupid piece of software then use that instead.
Hyperterminal didn't have file transfer limitations built-in to it. I used Hyperterminal regularly to transfer files much larger than a few hundred kilobytes.
My experience was that hyperterminal, when transfering files, would give up after retrying a few blocks and there was no way to tell it to not do that and keep trying.
I'm surprised to see no references to space applications. Back when I was using Kermit on CP/M I had an acquaintance who hacked Kermit for satellite coms at TRW in El Segundo. Long live W6TRW!
I had a toshiba T3100 laptop that was impossibly finicky about what OS it would run (I only sold it off to a collector finally a few years ago).
After hundreds of hours of attempts I managed to get FreeDOS 0.4b to boot up successfully off a 720kb floppy. I tried a ridiculous number of DOSes (including 3.2 that it originally shipped with) and other OSes and THAT version of FreeDOS is the only one that would load for some reason.
Anyways, all that to say I used that laptop for years with a kermit lite client to act as a serial console to some of my ccmp machines (Sparc Station 20 etc). Worked beautifully and gorgeously as that (640x400 orange gas plasma display) .
If you are a fan of old systems and want a nice serial terminal get a t3x00. They arent that expensive and they have a wonderful keyboard and beautiful screens :)
