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Columbia University Ending the Kermit Project
An anonymous reader writes "Columbia University has announced that the Kermit Project will be ended in July 2011, after more than 30 years in existence. Open Kermit (C-Kermit) will remain available, but without any support or ongoing development. Kermit-95, which cannot be open-sourced, will remain available for license purchases but without support or maintenance."
I remember it as an option when bbs'ing. I never used it for much that I recall. Has it simply lost relevance?
Although I really only ever used kermit so i could download zmodem...
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
Did a lot of kermit scripting in my early years, mainly using it to script uploads of inventory to mainframes. I only know of one guy who still uses it in my area now, though.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's not easy needing green...
(bows head)
Used Kermit from a 286 running MS-DOS 3.3, dialing 300 baud to our college's VAX. Ahhh, memories.
Poor Kermit. He was never the same after he got laid off from that theater group. He didnt like the managment choices. Said it was a puppet regime.
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Being more of an Amiga BBS guy, I never got into Kermit over Zmodem and other similar protocols. I mean, I know Kermit is more than just a protocol, but in practice that's how I saw it used 99% of the time. I've only used Kermit once - uploading machine language to a 68HC11 in the 90s - and was genuinely surprised to see that it was still officially a live project until now.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Condolences to Miss Piggy. I bet she will be devastated by the news.
Sad news indeed. Kermit has finally croaked.
The hours that Kermit saved me. I was able to hook up my modem and connect to the university mainframe from many different location. I did not have to go the computer lab or be inconvenienced when it was closed on holidays or all the terminals were taken. It was one of those things that had an incalculable effect on productivity, positive that is, unlike trade wars.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Kermit was and may still be useful when your connection is terrible. I am willing to bet that today it is used more than zmodem or xmodem.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's too bad. I remember Kermit - nice protocol before zmodem came out. Ahhh, the joys of the BBS-era and writing your own code with a US Robotics Sportster 2400 Baud Modem (fastest at the time!)...
More than Duke Nukem or anything else I've heard referenced recently, none have blasted me back to my youth more than hearing the words "kermit" and "zmodem". Right around the same time that you could go down to the local Hacker Shack (later renamed, due to conflicts with Radio Shack) and thumb through thousands of 5.25" floppies organized like mini-albums and you'd pay a buck just for a floppy with a looping black and white video you could watch on your grainy CGA.
God damn, I miss those days. I'm glad the internet is widespread and aiding tens of millions of people in their life on a daily basis, but there was something delightful about being part of a tiny group of weirdos connecting to each other with ATA commands and some guy's hobby board.
I remember I got the C-Kermit source code from college back in 1988. I had to do crazy things to upload the code to a Dual S100 Unix computer at work. I had dial into work via modem and upload each source file using "cat filename" on the remote system and doing ASCII uploads from home. It took me several days but the code compiled and worked so I had Kermit at work now.
Wow, in my college and post college days I used that protocol in so many places and so many ways I can't even begin to count. That was a very conservative protocol that was able to go through almost anything. One time I had it go from a portable computer over a modem connection to an Equinox data switch to an AT&T 3b5 Unix, to a cu back to the Equinox (to change the speed from 300 baud to 9600 baud) to an IBM 7171 protocol converter to an IBM 4361. And it could actually transfer files. Another time I had to stress test a DECNET terminal simulator on a Sun (the old version would fail in the middle of the day on the busiest of days) So I used kermit to connect to host1, then to host 2, back to host 1, back to host 2, I think something like 40 times. Then I did a file transfer through all the connections. It worked.
I use c-kermit a lot on RS232 based embedded boards, like the beagleboard. It's the only terminal emulator I have found that can easily go into file transfer mode and then back to command prompt.
But I am not too worried. Columbia University hasn't done anything with c-kermit since 2004. It is simple C code that is easy to maintain and will probably be re-compilable for the foreseeable future.
The company where I worked in college (Digital Techniques Inc. who made a line of touchscreen computers in the early 80s) had an MS-DOS machine that ran on STD-Bus, non-PC compatible... and with the source-code from Columbia (on 9-track tape!) I was able to write a communication driver for the 2661 DUART (same as in the Zenith Z-100, and as compared to the IBM-PC's 8250 UART). Finally we could zap files up to the VAX at a blazing 19,200 baud! Never could iron out all the interrupt issues for even-higher speeds.
A few years later when this Linux thing came along I said, Aha! ... thanks Kermit for being Open before Open was cool.
Stinky puns...wonderful...but, still stinky all the same.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
From the Columbia's web site
"On or before June 30, 2011, there will be Open Source versions of C-Kermit, E-Kermit, and Kermit 95. "
Unless the anonymous reader has some inside information...
Man i feel old now.. And it sad to see part of our history 'die'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought Kermit (and Ernie) passed away in May 1990
I miss Kermit like I miss my old Kreidler motobike, found memories but I'd probable wouldn't really like it if I would need it again...
But what I would really appreciate from columbia would be a clear and detailled explanation of what parts or "kind of parts" of kermit-95 and why ? cannot be open sourced ? :-) .. ....
Are there pieces of code written by Open Source adverse copyright holders ?
Or "lost coypright holders" that have rights but cannot be located
Or legally "challenged" copyright holders (childs who are too young to "agree" to anything but are the sole heir of some copyrights ? for example ?)
Backdoors mandated by some three letters authority that cannot be released under an open source licences
code that implement something patented and the patent holders do not authorise the inclusion in open source code
Or contracts with former clients prohibiting "unfair compétition"...
or, or,
I know that the value of an Open Source Kermit-95 would be very law, it might be better on Windows than C-Kermit for some values of "better"...
but it's unlikelly that any futur use would be better served with an update of K95 rather than a modificiation of CK.
But the lesson on "freeing" code would be very interesting, and after all Columbia as a quite proheminent law school... so it would be interesting...
I remember getting Kermit years ago, for college, then years later for university (and I convocated more than a dozen years ago). I remember it was really good stuff, way back when, but that was about 20 years ago. Sad to see support go, but I don't know how many people are using it anymore (or how many have to). They are talking about Kermit 95 on the site, but I remember Kermit 95 as the 'new version', and I was for quite a few years using the old version. I remember also using it because it worked better than xmodem or ymodem, and also that it could automagically convert from EBCDIC to ASCII.
I see (thanks google) that in 1985 I contributed c64boot to the Kermit project to get files onto a Commodore 64 ... and at the other end of the scale I was wondering about C-Kermit for UTS (Amdahl's port of Unix to 370-architecture mainframes.) There was actually a connection (uh, sorry) there, both related to the project I was working on at the time.
(And when was the last time you saw an email addy like "ACDMAYER%UOGUELPH.BITNET@WISCVM" ?)
(ob. "All you kids get off my lawn!")
-- Alastair
...a couple of months ago.
'Course I didn't implement any of the snazzy new features like improved checksums and sliding windows.
It's also much more tolerant of non-8bit-clean links, like Telnet by default.
That and my speedy VIC-Modem (yes, the one you had to dial using the telephone, slide the switch to data and hang up the receiver)
I'm pretty sure it wasn't even 300 baud
Funny thing, I still have that thing...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Well, you outlived the Pine project by 12 years. Congratulations on a long and highly-successful run!
Goodbye, farewell, and Amen!
First, the story about Commodore trying to revive the 64 line, and now this. It was the two of them together, that enabled me to wreck my last year of college beyond all hope of repair.
I had gotten a 300 baud modem for my C=64, but to get something "real" I had to type in a Kermit transfer program in Commodore BASIC, then use that program to download a Kermit program with built-in VT52 emulation. That transfer took over 3 hours, but oh boy was it worth it. I wasted many nights, dialed in to the campus VAX/11-750, chatting and emailing on Bitnet, trying hacks in Pascal, and generally being a kid in a candy store, all from my dorm room.
The good ol' days weren't really that good, but they were exciting, in that it was a thrill to see what dedicated hacking could get a machine to do.
Kermit is a brilliant protocol and the only one which could 'naturally' handle a 7-bit pipe.
Most people's opinion of Kermit was seriously affected by some very poor, lowest common denominator implementations which failed to handle large packets nor proper windowing nor compression. Properly implemented Kermit tools beat the pants of all of the -modem based protocols.
To be honest, I'm surprised they kept it going this long. But it'll remain as a good teaching tool for communication technologies, I'm sure.
The ISS and the Arkansas Primary & Secondary Computing Network still use kermit, today.
For those in the know - will kermit have a viable future as a truly open source tool, or is it of less interest in this day and age?
Looking over my Mom's shoulder, Kermit gave me my first glimpse of email, my first experience with vi (her preferred email editor), and indirectly I guess, put me on the engineering career path to where I am today... Curse you Kermit!
I bootstrapped Kermit onto both PDP-11s and VAXs for years. It seemed like I never had it on whatever media I needed whether it was 8 inch floppy or RL02. You could copy a hexified version of the program in through a serial port and then convert it to an executable. After that it was smooth sailing.
Rest In Peace Kermit. It's well deserved.
I actually wrote an implementation of the Kermit protocol in Basic Plus for the DEC PDP 11/70 back in about 1983. Used to bring the whole system to its knees transferring a file.
Is "will be ended" the new way to say "will end"?
Such progress in linguistics.
Story from 2003
http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/12/10/1957244/Kermit-Alive-and-Well-on-the-Space-Station
I still use Kermit to connect to serial terminals nearly every day. Few other programs are easily scriptable and can handle the myriad of communication tweaks you might need (flow control, carrier detection, sending breaks, etc). The only part that annoys me is that it's not free, and it doesn't support LF->CRLF translation on incoming text (although it does support CR->CRLF, go figure)
I've been telling since the 90s to friends, seeing me using Windows, why I do so: it's the evolutionary spin-off of Kermit: provides I/O, minimal control over the local hardware, can occasionally drive a printer, has some configuration options -you don't really strive to back it up- and, if it ever breaks, you just reinstall it! Long live Kermit!
Notice that those posting their memories have UID's under 10000. You could probably filter out anyone who even knows that Kermit exists by their UID's alone. /. account the first day.
And yes my UID is in the 20k's but only because I forgot to get a
The frog is dead. Long live the frog.
Back in ~1994 the place I was working had a mail system for PCs and servers that the IT department had cobbled together out of Kermit and airplane glue. If you had more than 200KB of mail it would crash your computer and die in ugly ways. It was really annoying, after having been on Unix mail systems since the late 70s, and having used Kermit successfully to do real work as well. Worse than IBM PROFS, worse than Prodigy over 300 baud, much less capable than Fidonet or most 1980s BBS systems. And the IT department always worked in their offices with PCs that were on a LAN, while out in the field we used laptops and dialup.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sometime last year I was working on a router or maybe a firewall at some remote site that I could only access by dialup modem, because the WAN hadn't been installed yet. It was very nice to notice that it supported xmodem, as did my terminal program, so I was able to back up the configuration files instead of cutting and pasting them all from the screen. Dragged up a lot of old memories...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I still use Zmodem with sz and rz commands in Linux and SecureCRT and PuTTY's Zmodem (rz.exe and sz.exe; http://leputty.sourceforge.net/ ). Much faster and easier than scp and sftp IMO.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I wrote the computervision cgos kermit many moons ago.
Just wondering.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
One of the programmers on the original Kermit project at Columbia University was a grad student who had a 2 yro daughter. We lived on the same street and also had a 2 yro daughter. The two girls played together a lot at the neighborhood playground in Riverside Park near Columbia, and we got to know the family pretty well.
The grad student's daughter loved the Muppets and especially Kermit. He named the program he was working on for her favorite Muppet.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I remember an old Perkin Elmer minicomputer that was used at a laboratory testing oil samples.
The only way to get anything in or out of the thing was kermit over async serial line.
At the time I wasn't quite as UNIX headed .. I thought it very funny that the day that we installed brand new HP high volume / high capacity laser printers was the day I was asked if it had a serial interface available (why they didn't just do LPD I'll never know).
I depend on my local BBS for shareware and stuff. How will I download files through my dial-up connection now? Will I need to fall-back to X-Modem? Oh noooooooooooo!
Ahh, Kermit.
Kermit was more or less the swiss-army knife of terminal and file transfer. You could move pretty much any file over any link between any two systems with it. If the link was questionable, just use the native kermit file transfer protocol. It was slow, but if you needed a file moved over a link that had unknown escape characters, noise, and so on, it was the way to go.
Heck, we used it on the DOS/Windows 3.1 based computers at the FIU computer lab to telnet into the VAX and UNIX systems from DOS.
It's ironic, because I used it so much in computer labs, but never actually used it personally. Under DOS I used Telemate, in Linux I used Minicom, and these days on most UNIX systems I used "screen", because all I need is a text terminal and rarely need to transfer files via serial anymore.
Those were the days. Fun to reminisce about, but I honestly wouldn't want to live through them again. I find "scp remotehost:/path/to/file ." a lot less painful. ;)
The first try was with uucp, but they couldn't handle its operations on the Bucharest side. Phone lines weren't stable enough, then. So, for the 1st 6 months, email was sent to Bucharest by Kermit file transfer, triggered by a hodge-podge of MDA scripts, invoked by sendmail. Kermit was way more robust than any other file transfer protocol at this time, we believed eventually it could handle bit transfers over wet clothes lines.
After 6 months, we got uucp going, after getting more help with the network connection from government and EU. Some more months later, we got IP going. Those of you who take always-online for granted don't know at all what effort it takes to make that work.
Ah, I think I'm getting old. Get off my lawn... :-) :-) :-)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
And yes I used it for file transfer too. Not as fast as Z-modem, but Z-modem for some platforms was had to find. later I maintained one of the Kermit platform ports for a while (what in the world was it for, Pr1me, HP, ???)
Sigh ... haven't used it since early 90's, yet that sound comes to mind immediately.
Many go on and on about the nostalgia, but for me C-Kermit is software I use every damn day! I have yet to see a better serial terminal for embedded Linux development. And though many will speak of Minicom, go ahead try and log data to a file. You'll find that you're missing data, your transfers may fail and it generally cannot compete with the experience that C-Kermit provides.
I don't miss those days at all. Sure Kermit was useful in its day - but for almost all of us that day is long gone. FWIW I don't miss Gopher, modem initialization strings, nor any of the arcana we used to have to invoke to accomplish what now are simple, mindless tasks.
Feel free to mourn Kermit, but I'll be happily dancing at its wake. The world has moved on.
#DeleteChrome
I worked at a computer manufacturer once, and their process for supplying components to manufacturers was:
1 - print out stock list from the VAX
2 - type all of it into a spreadsheet (2 people working for a week)
3 - prepare stock despatch orders
As stock levels changed in the week they were entered (not to mention that traditional "1 in 300 keystrokes is an error" problem) it was a never ending battle - every month. That's when I wandered in after having fixed a problem with Paradox elsewhere. Management wasn't receptive to new ideas (mostly because they were stuck up "not invented here" types) so I skunkworked it.
The guy who ran the VAX installed a kermit server and changed the report so it had a standard filename. I hacked a few things together in Turbo Pascal (cleaning out headers) and Paradox PAL (easiest to integrate with other stuff) and the whole 2 manweeks exercise became a 15 minute batch file - and accurate.
Thank you Kermit :-).
What? A raise? Hahaha, no, it wasn't that type of company - its management was saturated with "not invented here" types which is what eventually wrecked the company. I resigned a month later for a much better job.
Insert
Back when I was doing freelance contracting in the early 90s I relied on it. Unix, Xenix, DOS, compiled it on a bunch of things. I could use it to talk to anything, I reckon with the right parameters it could talk to a broken toaster. It may not have been the fastest protocol around but it WORKED. I was sorry to see it closed up, and I'm sorry to see it go.
Well, the Columbians have killed Kermit at last. Can't say that I'm surprised. What with their cocaine plantations and their FARC rebels. Personally, I always thought Kermit was making trips down there for the strangest reasons. He acted weird when he was in front of the camera, and he hung out with John Denver, another well known cocaine addict. Good riddance I say. Why are there so many songs about rainbows. Cause you're sitting around high on coke writing them with drug enthusiasts like John Denver, that's why.
Zmodem is superior to Kermit over a modem in every way when you are talking about transferring files and not trying to chat while transferring files or something. It will crank its window size down very, very far and thus still work on noisy lines. In my long history as a BBSer I used basically every transfer protocol invented including xmodem, ymodem, ymodem-z, zmodem, biturbo, hyperprotocol, and yes, kermit. Kermit's only real advantage today is that, as others have pointed out, it is tolerant of 7bit connections.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For downloading a file from a BBS to a computer you are correct. But Kermit is still being used on things like floating sensors and was used on the space station. It has to do with use cases.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't think it's being used because it's the best tool for transferring files, though. It's because it's a communications swiss army knife that covers all use cases for the given problem. If you want a single simple channel over which you can do both interactive communications and file transfers then there is probably no single package which will work in nearly all use cases which is simpler than kermit. What's the next step up, a complete Unixlike?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/home.html
Kermit Project Canceled Effective 1 July 2011
As of 29 April 2011 the Kermit Project is 30 years old
So, it reaches 30 years old and they immediately kill it. I'm sure I've heard of something like that somewhere before...
But in those cases it becomes the best tool for the job and that is why it is being used to this day. Zmodem is a very optimized tool for doing one thing and it does it well. The problem is that problem that it solved is now extremely rare. Very few people use dial up modems to transfer files to and from BBSs and or from PC to PC. Now we use TCP/IP and SCP, sftp, maybe ftp, dropbox, NFS, and a number of other tools. Kermit solves a number of problems so it is still being used. But even those problems are getting rare. It isn't about which is the better file transfer protocol it is which is still in use.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"I didn't particularly want to understand it. I just wanted to use it to download."
"And free services have found new and interesting ways to slow down downloads by splitting them up, imposing time limits and restrictions and trying to get you to pay for the privilege of having those restrictions removed."
Based on your commentary above, you appear to be what we old-timey SysOps would call a "leech". You just want files for free. All this equipment and bandwidth costs money. That's where there are things like download limits, upload ratios, pay avenues, etc.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I first started using Kermit's ftp options in 2001. It was a beta release. I remember reading, "Kermit will never help you get a job, but it can help you get your job done". That has been so true for me. I can only hope as opensource I can continue using it.
"Did people even use Kermit after Zmodem was available?"
Kermit was designed and useful for incompatible systems and bad links. Think 7-bit links, mainframes, less-common minicomputers, non-ASCII systems, repurposed long-distance telecom data lines, odd filename restrictions or formats, OS-imposed file formats, brain damaged terminal systems, limited C compiler support, limited system libraries, etc. Kermit wasn't trying to be fast or sophisticated, it was trying to be portable and universal. Different goals.
ZModem was tuned for the 8-bit microcomputer world, where everything was 8N1 and relatively intelligent. There are gains to be had by limiting your scope.
Of course, YModem-G was preferred by those of us with ARQ modems, since omitting error correction from the file transfer protocol gave it a speed boost.
And IIRC, C-Kermit was also a terminal emulator, not just a file transfer protocol. I remember running it (or something like C-Kermit) on a DOS-ish voice mail system that had some dislike of most "fancier" software. It let me talk to the phone switch without having to lug a terminal into the phone closet.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I still use Kermit to control and test avionics. The Kermit scripting language is a little weird, but it is extremely useful for automating the configuration and testing of equipment since lots of avionics devices use RS232 or RS422 serial ports.
Just open-source the entire product (ie: Kermit-95) and let the Internet community decide whether to continue its development independently.
I needed to google some kermit magic, and then I saw this page. When I heard the news about the discontinued development, it seemed like the end of an era. Using kermit was one of the first things I learned in my very first job, back in 1991. And I am still a user, after 20 years :-)