C-Kermit, the long-running communications utility born at Columbia in 1981, is back with its first major new release in 15 years.
Debian dev John Goerzen has been busy reviving the dead. Not the most sincerely dead, but the pretty-much-mostly-dead.
C-Kermit is a multi-platform file transfer utility from ancient times that Goerzen has been keeping on life support for Debian. It was born in 1981 — the year Reagan took over the White House — a time when computing “was expensive and it was far from a given that machines from one vendor would be able to talk to those from another” according to Goerzen.
Getting something like a DECSYSTEM-20 and an IBM mainframe to talk to each other — or to at least be able to listen and understand — was the itch that Columbia University was scratching when it put a couple of developers to work designing a serial protocol they called Kermit.
“The Kermit protocol was highly adaptable from the start: able to handle systems that had trouble processing more than 96 bytes of data at once, able to transfer 8-bit files over 7-bit links, able to translate between character sets (ASCII and EBCDIC then; now also various Unicodes), and of course, handling of error-prone serial links,” Goerzen said.
The new software also scratched itches for Columbia that plenty of others also needed scratching. Within a year it had been ported to MS-DOS and Unix, and C-Kermit — the version written in C — became the flagship edition.
For 30 years it was owned by Columbia University, which released it under a license that restricted redistribution and resale, and required payment for commercial use, which kept it from being included in many Linux distributions of the day. In 2011, Columbia ended the project and released C-Kermit under the open source Revised 3-Clause BSD License. Co-creator Frank da Cruz continued to maintain and develop the project until last year.
Which brings us back to where we started, with John Goerzen working to bring a dead frog back to life.
Somewhere along the way, as part of his work maintaining Kermit for Debian, Goerzen started working at a deep level on the C-Kermit version. He’s recently chronicled this work to make the software useful on modern hardware and not just for people running the hardware that was available when Columbia dropped the project 15 years ago in an article he published on Monday.
The work he’s done to make this software useful for modern users is exhaustive, and rather than try to put together a list here, I’ll direct you to what looks to be a complete changelog he’s posted on GitHub. He’s also started a project at Open Kermit, “to coordinate future development in the open and keep Kermit going.”
If you’re ready to download and install in order to give it a look, you can download it from the Kermit Downloads and Installation page. In good open source style, there’s also a page for those of you who’d like to contribute.
“C-Kermit 11 is a major new release, the first non-beta since the last 9.x release in 2011. It represents a significant effort to modernize and improve the C-Kermit codebase,” Goerzen said.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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