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I once entered a chat on CompuServe with Ward Christensen, the author of Xmodem. Was ~1984/1985. Had a nice chat (at $6/hour) with him, and he was pretty surp

I once entered a chat on CompuServe with Ward Christensen, the author of Xmodem. Was ~1984/1985. Had a nice chat (at $6/hour) with him, and he was pretty surprised I (nay, anyone) recognized his name and what he had done. Nice guy as I recall.

ceautery 4y ago
That's awesome! Ironically, Xmodem wouldn't have worked well over CIS's network, since to talk to the X25 nodes you had to have software flow control enabled in your modem connection. Small transfers might work, but when you hit the Xmodem block number that coincides with ^Q, that block would repeatedly NAK until the transfer failed.
- ok123456 4y ago
  You could download things from Compuserv's file forums with Xmodem. They probably had some kind of escaping to overcome that???
  - icedchai 4y ago
    You could. I remember doing it (on my Apple IIc, right around 1988-89!)
beaugunderson 4y ago
I've been reading about Ward in the book that just came out about the BBS era called "The Modem World"; only three chapters in but it's a good read so far.