Kermit Alive and Well on the Space Station

An Ominous Cow Erred writes "Spacedaily.com reports on the use of the fantastic Kermit "program" being used to communicate with devices on the international space station. While the article's author doesn't seem to have a quite perfect grasp on what Kermit is (and effuses about how Kermit is being used to help war-torn Bosnia and advance AIDS research) it brought a smile to my face to imagine the old protocol from my BBS days (which was scorned in favor of Zmodem) being used on the greatest technological achievement of humankind."

Comments

kermit v zmodem

[sir_cello]

You need to understand the differences.

zmodem is high performance single streaming large packet size negative-acknowledgement only protocol - it fails badly in noisy or lossy style of environments.

kermit is far more robust, can interoperate with various different systems of different character encoding, had adaptive retransmission, and can perform just as well as kermit under the right circumstances.

The BBS implementations of kermit were not as sophisticated as the protocol could be, and most BBS environments didn't need the kind of features that kermit had. kermit is also of the emacs style: it's not just a protocol by an entire interactive terminal in itself: scripts, command line, etc.

and don't forget...

[stile]

Need reliability in an environment where your electrical equipment is being slowly dissolved by ionizing radiation?

You just made a great case for Kermit, but I feel it needs a bit of a summary:

in space, reliability is key

Often triply redundant systems are deployed, and their life expectancy is STILL 5-10 years at best.

Re:sheeesssh...

[ncc74656]

Don't knock it, man... there are tabloids, and then there is the Weekly World News.

Q: What's the difference between the Weekly World News and the New York Times?

A: The Weekly World News tells you that it makes up its stories.