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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."
Kermit Alive and Well on the Space Station
This place is starting to sound like the Weekly World News.
"Archie disappears, Veronica suspect! Gopher dug the hole far aWAIS!"
Trolling is a art,
Immediatly have the image of a large green frog floating around in the weightlessness?
(which was scorned in favor of Zmodem)
:)
With good reason.
IceZmodem rocked.
hi-ho, kermit thee frog here, and welcome to thee ISS.
Weren't you using it to download porn back then too?
the greatest technological achievement of humankind
I think 'debateably' should be added to that.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After Kermit 95, there probably will be Kermit 98, followed by Kermit NT, Kermit ME, Kermit 2000, and finally Kermit XP.
But somehow, I can't imagine Kermit Longhorn as a species... :-)
Seriously, it definitely was (is?) a great program, especially when communicating between less common platforms. It saved my day more than once when I needed to transfer files between the VAX and Amiga, both quite ancient, and without ethernet hardware on Amiga. Many thanks to the creators!
Alex
The Army reading list
And sometimes a resource hog. I was told by the admins of the public Sun boxes at UT (circa late 80's)not to use it any more since it kept using all of the CPU. Fun stuff.
No sig, sorry.
Kermit is an extensible file transfer protocol first developed at Columbia University in New York City in 1981 for transferring text and binary files without errors between diverse types of computers over potentially hostile communication links, and it is a suite of communications software programs from the Kermit Project at Columbia University. The Kermit protocol and software are named after Kermit the Frog, star of the television series, The Muppet Show; the name Kermit is used by permission of Henson Associates, Inc.
Over the years, the Kermit Project has grown into a worldwide cooperative nonprofit software development effort, headquartered at and coordinated from Columbia University. The Kermit Project is dedicated to production of cross-platform, long-lasting, standards-conformant, interoperable communications software, and is actively engaged in the standards process.
Since its inception in 1981, the Kermit protocol has developed into a sophisticated and powerful transport-independent tool for file transfer and management, incorporating, among other things:
KERMIT PROTOCOL
The feature that distinguishes Kermit protocol from most others is its wide range of settings to allow adaptation to any kind of connection between any two kinds of computers. Most other protocols are designed to work only on certain kinds or qualities of connections, and/or between certain kinds of computers, and therefore work poorly (or not at all) elsewhere and offer few if any methods to adapt to unplanned-for situations. Kermit, on the other hand, allows you to achieve successful file transfer and the highest possible performance on any given connection.
Unlike FTP or X-, Y-, and ZMODEM (the other protocols with which Kermit is most often compared) Kermit protocol does not assume or require:
(although Kermit does not require any of these conditions, it can take advantage of them when they are available). A feature article on Kermit protocol by Tim Kientzle in the February 1996 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal noted that "Kermit's windowing approach is faster than protocols such as XModem and YModem . . . What many people don't realize is that under less-than-ideal conditions, Kermit's windowing approach is significantly faster than ZModem, a protocol with a well-deserved reputation for fast transfers over good-quality lines."
Thus Kermit transfers work "out of the box" almost every time.
In space, no-one can hear you croak.
MUPPETS...
IN...
SPACE...
</ghostly announcer voice>
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
PIIIIIIIIIIGGGSSS IIIINNN SPAAAaaaccccceeeeee.....
Come on, did *no-one* else think of that muppets sketch ?
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
It can be hard when grasping Kermit...just ask Miss Piggy.
Posted anonymously, like saltwater taffy.
International Space Station Incorporates Columbia's Kermit Software Program
slap on a kermit and save the day
by Michael Larkin
New York - Dec 09, 2003
Created almost 25 years ago by Columbia's academic computing center to help manage the high demand on the University's mainframes, a software program known as Kermit has leapt all the way to the International Space Station where it is being used in a scientific experiment.
Designed to allow two different computer systems to interact, Kermit was used to solve a compatibility problem on the space station. Using two versions of program, one of which was modified specifically for NASA, an experimental device referred to as CLSM-2 can now share information with another computer on board the space station that transmits data back to earth.
"Kermit and Kermit 95 have been invaluable tools to improve our computing efficiency, both in development and in the final operational system," wrote Dave Hall, senior engineer, ZIN Technologies on Kermit's Columbia Web site.
The significance of Kermit is not entirely its invention or its inclusion in the state-of-the-art experiment, but its ability to evolve and to retain its viability in the always-expanding computer industry.
And as one of its creators admits, it was never imagined that Kermit would develop the way it did. "Nobody expected the protocol and software to become a worldwide de facto standard, but even if we had, there are not many things we would have done differently, except in choosing a name," said Frank da Cruz, a manager who has worked on the project since its inception. He recalled amusingly how a picture of the friendly green amphibian swayed his judgment when it came time to name the project.
According to da Cruz, Kermit was borne out of a project to alleviate the strain on the University's academic mainframe computers in the late 1970's, which could only provide 35KB of storage per student. Columbia employees developed a protocol to transfer information from the mainframes to floppy disks through microcomputers that were installed around the university. The first Kermit file transfer occurred in April 1981.
The introduction and the ensuing popularity of IBM's personal computer (PC) prompted the next stage in Kermit's evolution. The university adapted the Kermit protocol to address the PC's incompatibility with Columbia's other computers and released it in January 1983. The PC version proved widely popular and was the subject of books published in English, French, German and Japanese.
At the same time, Kermit programs were developed for minicomputers being used in several Columbia departments. Its popularity continued to grow through the mid-1980s, and by 1986, Kermit was well established at Columbia and a fixture at many other universities, government agencies and companies worldwide.
Through the years, hundreds of Kermit programs have been written at Columbia and elsewhere and distributed through the project. In the early 1990s Kermit software was engineered to handle Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish and many other languages via both their traditional character sets and Unicode, the new Universal Character Set.
"At conferences in Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan, we quickly came to appreciate the enormous demand for computer communication in diverse languages and writing systems, and worked to make it a reality," said da Cruz.
Kermit 95, which was created for Windows 95 and its successors, was licensed to universities such as Oxford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and the entire SUNY college system; and was bulk licensed to over 800 companies and government agencies worldwide.
Kermit was initially shared with other organizations at no cost, despite the fact that it used a great amount of resources to coordinate the writing of new programs to archive results and to distribute the software. But in 1986, the Kermit Project was formed and distribution fees were establish
Talk about flash back
I still use Kermit almost daily. I intereact with my casino's slot system with a VT100 terminal emulator. If I want to download reports to use in another application, I have to use Kermit to get them.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
The author of the article has a very nice grasp of what Kermit is. It's not just a protocol, but a program complete with scripting capabilities, modem dialing, transfers using several protocols (including Kermit of course). It can even do TCP transfers now. It's a great program, but it's a little hard to use and mostly surpassed by simpler tools now. Still, I needed to use it a few years ago to automate modem uploads to a mainframe.
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.
rz\r
rz\r
rz\r
man screw this
^Z^Z^Z^Z^Z^Z^Z^Z
dsgkh$#@^%@26 3421lj __ 34 NO CARRIER
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
TT
Never forget the ultimate in thieving scum protocols.
LeechZmodem.
It was a mutation of the Zmodem transfer protocol that never sent an acknowledgment packet at the end of a transfer, allowing you to download an entire file, yet signal to the bulletin board system that you'd never received the complete file. End result: your file credits don't change.
I doubt NASA cares, though.
Man:It's a flyswatter!
Woman:It's a spatula!
Man:It's a flyswatter!
Woman:It's a spatula!
Man:It's a flyswatter!
Woman:It's a spatula!
Announcer:Wait! You're both right!
All's true that is mistrusted
jerkcity (webcomic) on kermit's uses
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Boy, it takes me back to read the word "Kermit" when not related to a frog... I actually used to use that... but there was no Slashdot then to talk about it on.
stuff |
Kermit, it wasn't fast, but I swear that protocol could almost talk through mud. I used it through terminal servers, over X.25, over DECNET, over a freaking IBM 7171 converter (anyone else remember these monsters?). I even used it to stress test a Sun to DECNET comm program (keep signing on back and forth between a and b back to a back to b back to a), and then doing a kermit file transfer. Easy way to simulate 40 people using the system simultanously. But a friend of mine has me beat, IP over kermit over a satellite bounce from the south poll.
Spacecraft confirms it. The Kermit protocol is dying ...
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
That is all.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Fact: Kermit is dying
It is common knowledge that Kermit is dying. Everyone knows that ever hapless Kermit is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which Kermit is the worst off of an admittedly suffering Kermit community. The numbers continue to decline for Windows but Kermit may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for Kermit continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
All major marketing surveys show that Kermit has steadily declined in market share. Kermit is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Kermit is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes Kermit is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: Kermit is dying
(Inspired by a Win98 / FreeBSD Troll)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Kermit is dead. Zmodem is dead. The argument died ten years ago! Get over it!
It's not pinin', it's passed on! This protocol is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of value, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the Space Station it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its CPU usage is now zero! It's off the box! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PROTOCOL!!
Sheesh, if you want an argument to die around here, you've got to complain 'til you're blue in the face.
John
That's true. The purpose of ZMODEM is to transfer data as fast as possible, on a fairly modern system with clean phone lines, plentiful memory for buffering, and fast I/O that doesn't block. On a modern system, ZMODEM is the best character-based protocol out there (there were a few that were more advanced or had special purposes, like BiModem, but they are irrelevant now that everything now uses packet-based data and TCP/IP).
:)
The purpose of Kermit is to be 100% compatible with pretty much every piece of technology, going all the way back to the earliest mainframe computers!
Different character set (ASCII, EBCDIC, UTF-8, etc.)? Kermit will translate the data as it is transferred.
Strange record length requirement (data must be transferred in units of 80 bytes or so, and can't be addressed as individual characters)? This was common on mainframes. Kermit will pad data as required to make this work.
Limited I/O that can't use the comm port and storage device at the same time? This was common on old DOS PC comm programs that could not multitask. Kermit will delay as needed in order to let data be stored before continuing with the communications, and synchronize this with the other side so that data is not lost.
Noisy phone line? Kermit will do complete error correction, without stalling or aborting the transfer (as ZMODEM was known to do).
Low memory for buffering? Kermit will do handshaking to ensure that the other side doesn't send data until the current data has been fully processed, minimizing the need for memory to buffer data.
Alien directory structure (VAX, etc.)? Kermit includes a mini-OS that can be used interactively to browse directories and initiate file transfers, and it abstracts the local storage conventions of the system's OS into a simple hierarchy that is the lowest common denominator. As an example of what this means, have you ever done a "ftp" into an old DOS system, and found yourself unable to change drive letters, because FTP (being a UNIX-based program) has no concept of drive letters? Kermit to the rescue here.
Now that computers and protocols are beginning to become standardized, thanks in part to the popularity of the Internet, the need for Kermit is fading. Still, it's good to read about interesting uses of Kermit such as this. Kermit joins the old DOS shareware program "Compushow" as having The Right Stuff....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
You mean they are running it on Linux??? No, that couldn't be it. You couldn't possibly be referring to the ISS could you? If so exactly what about the ISS is a great achievement other than they managing to spend staggering sums to accomplish nothing. The ISS is in a close race with the war in Iraq in that category.
@de_machina
I found my introduction to the BBS community when I was 8 or so and going through everything that came with our new computer. While playing with lotus 1-2-3 I came across a bunch of options I didn't understand, but one said Kermit, like the frog, so I checked that out. This brought me to the (horrible) built in terminal and gave me some options for dialing numbers. That's what gave me a clue as to what that one weird shaped port was on the back of the computer, so I hooked up the phoneline and dialed PKWare's BBS, which was the first BBS I ever connected to. After hours of long distance charges all over the country, much to my parents displeasure, I had a good terminal program (Terminate FYI :) and a decent list of local BBS.
:) Of course I ditched kermit for Zmodem, and a few other nutty protocols. Anybody remember the ones that would let you play tetris and such? Those were great back in the days of 2400 baud and single tasking operating systems.
:)
So I guess kermit played a crucial role in my life, as now I'm a network engineer
And since I'm feeling nostalgic I'll just throw these in at random.
-Annoying people by creating insanely large and annoying ANSI sigs.
-Fidonet
-KINGCOTT
-ANSI Bombs
-Legend of the Red Dragon
-TradeWars 2002
-Horrible misconfigured MajorBBS sites.
-Wardialing (ToneLoc!)
-Can I have Co-Sys?
If you understand anything in that list, you're probably a geek. If you understand everything in the list, you were probably as annoying of a punkass as I was
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Kermit is much more than a file transfer protocol.
Besides Serial communication, it can handle many network protocols: FTP, Telnet, HTTP, SSH to name a few. It can use the telnet comm control, to handle network attached modems. It has a macro/programming language. For those jobs where one needs to recognize success or failure of a transfer, this is a boon.
And in the Windows version it has a large number of terminal emulations.
Just a satisfied customer.
being used on the greatest technological achievement of humankind
Now, am I the only one who thinks the space station is not the greatest technological achievement of humankind? To me, the greatest invention is obvious: the Thermos cup. It keeps hot stuff hot, and it keeps cold stuff cold. But how does it know the difference??
It's all that separates us from the apes.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
The somewhat ironic thing is that Kermit did all of the things we associate with ZModem, too--it's just that except for the original Kermit program itself, most implementations of the protocol were based on the original spec, not the revisions concurrent with ZModem.
Kermit never matched ZModem's speed on good links. But I remember one time when I had to get files off a Unix machine which I could only connect to by dialing into an IBM mainframe which connected to a VAX on a remote campus, and telnetting from the VAX to the Unix machine. ZModem choked after a few blocks, XModem and YModem didn't even get that far, FTP wasn't available with that kind of nightmarish setup. Kermit worked flawlessly.
And that's probably why Kermit is still in use today in weird niche markets and ZModem, despite the fact that it was far more popular and in BBS applications--the main use home users had--a far better protocol, is largely a relic.
"But somehow, I can't imagine Kermit Longhorn as a species... :-)"
Oh really?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
THIS IS AN EX-PROTOCOL!!
There is nothing inherently wrong with the X protocol, simply XFree's implementation of it mmmkay!
Sorry, just a knee jerk reaction.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Kermit...I used that as a download protocol over our campus network back in college...it was an old system, only active for a couple of semesters while I was there...but the network was "8-bit unclean" and would garble characters and such over anything but kermit...then kermit decided it wouldn't work, so I had to use UUEncode...even devised a little script to resend only the packets I needed...but then again, that was back when I had my Amiga and 14.4Kbps was something great...
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.
You have got to be kidding me. Maybe maybe the moon race qualifies as the "greatest technological achievement of humankind" I have yet to hear of a single usefull discover onboard that (expensive) piece of low flying equipment.
Kermit always sends, receives data, always did with my Tandy and 300 kbps modem and later 1200 baud US Robotics. Do you think a competent NASA engineer or contractor would let a server running NT with MS TCP, RADIUS, etc. loose in space? Seriously, now. Lives are at stake.
Kermit is dead. Zmodem is dead.
Is it?
I don't know if you've heard or not, but there's a rumor that Kermit's Alive and Well on the Space Station...
How far one Mr. Kermit thee Frog will go to get away from one Ms. Piggy.
paintball
Kermit is NOT comparable to Zmodem.
It CAN be used as a silly filetransfer-protocol but it is more. It is in fact a fully fledged file-transfer suite, including things like recursive directory transfer, preservation of filepermissions, filedate, scripted transfers, etc. and back on the BBS Days only a small part of Kermit was used.
For DOS BBSs Zmodem or even better, Hydra (you could chat while transfering many files in both directions!) were much better.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
eg. "The very foundation of the free software movement no longer exists."
Look at everyone coming out of the woodwork with memories of their favorite protocols! I love it!
The fastest one I could get to work on my Tandy CoCo III at 2400 baud was Ymodem. A Zmodem one came later under OS9, but I already had a PC by then that could do Zmodem.
> the old protocol from my BBS days (which was
> scorned in favor of Zmodem) being used on
> the greatest technological achievement of
> humankind."
Cool. Kermit is being used to distribute
The Return of the King? Who woulda thunk it!
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I had no problems getting 0.95 line bandwidth out of Kermit, but then protocols 'r us. Note also the ancient Telebit references, now lost to the mists of time.
...-.-
They are very concerned about weight requirements on the shuttle/orbiter missions. The less bytes a computer program takes up, the less the overall weight of the spacecraft. I heard they had initally run the system on win2k, but would have needed an extra fuel tank to get it off the launching pad, and there was insufficient bandwidth way up there to keep up with the security updates, so this is why they opted for lighter-weight protocols and applications.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org