3 ms·

It's an old file transfer program.

• whartung 5y ago
  Yes, that's true, but it's understating it quite a bit. Kermit (actually , C-Kermit) is a serial communication program. Simply, it allowed you to connect to your serial port, and then interact with serial devices. Commonly the device you were interacting with was a modem, but that wasn't necessarily true. You could be connected straight up into another computer. Kermit is also a file transfer protocol, similar to XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM. These protocols were used to ensure that copy operations operated reliably through the use of checksums and whatnot. Serial was the most common physical layer that this was used over, but not necessarily the only layer. The Kermit protocol was quite sophisticated and able to work at various levels of advancement and compatibility. It was able to work over connections that were not 8-Bit pure. It supported dynamic window sizes to help boost performance. They used to publish the simplest of BASIC programs to act as a receiver so that you could use it to bootstrap moving over a more capable program that was more sophisticated for your platform. Speaking of that, Kermit was widely ported to most any system out there. As an example, the HP-48G calculator had Kermit built into it. Because of that, we used to use the HPs for data collection in the field, and then upload the results to a PC using Kermit. XMODEM et al were widely popular and supported. Kermit was also, but because of C-Kermit, its wide distribution, it was also its own little world. C-Kermit also had an innate scripting language making it very useful for ad hoc, automated workflows.