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Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died

(en.wikipedia.org)
322 points DamonHD | 1 comments | 13 Oct 24 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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shrubble ◴[13 Oct 24 18:56 UTC] No.41830558[source]▶
A friend who works in embedded systems pointed out that XMODEM protocol communication is used everywhere in embedded; it may be that the protocol is more widely shipped now than it has been in the past!

Many Cisco, Adtran, Juniper etc switches and routers have it in their firmware also.

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cmptrnerd6 ◴[14 Oct 24 01:29 UTC] No.41833347[source]▶
We just upgraded from Xmodem to Kermit last week in our embedded device.
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shrubble ◴[14 Oct 24 01:47 UTC] No.41833448[source]▶
Kermit is interesting also, though my understanding was that it was not quite as good as taking advantage of higher available data rates; am I wrong about that?
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1. devilbunny ◴[15 Oct 24 01:08 UTC] No.41843920[source]▶
Kermit defaulted to settings that would transmit 8-bit data over 7E1 through a noisy 110 bps channel (not really, but that gives the flavor - though it could do that if asked). Much-maligned because most terminal programs implemented the base case and nothing more, which was awful.

It was not trivial to reconfigure, but if you did, it had very good throughput. And if you had to make an EBCDIC/ASCII translation, it did that well. Kermit always works. That's the point of the protocol. If you want it to be fast, that's up to you. I did not realize this until I met Kermit gurus who taught me.