Need simple file transfer program

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Feb 26 13:56:18 2004

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 21:04, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

> It's funny how the Columbia folks put up a big FAQ trying to dispel
> various rumors about how Kermit is slow and inefficient and how Kermit is
> superior to everything because it will work under pretty much any
> condition (line noise, funky hardware, etc.) "out of the box" and ... it
> doesn't. Foo.
>
> Lamoids.
>
> Unless there's a Kermit expert out there who can tell me what I'm doing
> wrong, I'm writing Kermit off (and those foolios at Columbia...dorks).

Kermit is a great program, but people get religion about things, and
that never helps. It's great, but also suffers from versionitis,
creeping featuritis, and a number of other ills, and sometimes too much
complexity.

I can't recall the commands, but if the problem is serial port
handshaking, you can probably eliminate that by turning off the sliding
window feature, and going to ACK per packet, with 128-byte packets (or
smaller) and turn quoting off. This will KILL performance, but my take
on this sort of thing, YMMV, is that if it's a one time job, and the
RELIABLE solution is exceedingly slow, it's likely faster to just wait
and let the computer do it's foolish work while the wily human sleeps,
eats or watches TV. But you can make kermit work with a "three wire"
serial port.

XMODEM and it's ilk will lose all timestamps, and all files will be
rounded up to the next highest 128 bytes, filled with ^Zs.

ZMODEM-capable programs may do what you want, if the user-interface code
will do recursion. ZMODEM is fast as blazes, it doesn't get any faster
(I have done EXHAUSTIVE testing on file xfer protocols back in the
FidoNet days, and for-real ZMODEM has unbelievably low overhead and
EXCELLENT error-recovery -- Chuck Forsberg designed well and wrote
*good* code), and sorry Kermit people, does most of the nifty stuff that
Kermit does, EXCEPT if I remember correctly it's text transformations
are almost non-existent (but it sounds like you don't care about that).
Received on Thu Feb 26 2004 - 13:56:18 GMT

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