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k95source.txt
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The Kermit Project
New York City USA
…since 1981
Open Source Kermit 95 for Windows Progress Report
In 2013 two programmers, working mostly independently from each other,
attempted to resurrect Kermit 95 communications software as an Open
Source application. Missing modules were excavated and numerous problems
overcome, and each was finally able to build a working version. But much
work remains to be done.
It is unfortunate that the work was not completed, but hopefully by
revealing what has been done so far, someone else can combine the two
branches and do some of the tasks that remain (this is not a complete
list):
* A new installer is needed.
* A new name might be needed.
* There is no way to carry forward the K95 Dialer so it will be dropped
and K95, if it is to have a new life, will be as text-only application
with a few GUI dialogs. However, it is likely that any new release of
K95 will still work with the (commercial) K95 2.1.3 Dialer if you
happen to have a copy.
* SSL/TLS security needs to be brought up to date.
* SSH support must be totally redone since the K95's original SSH
module, circa 2002, is no longer secure; this might be accomplished
using libssh or libssh2 or PuTTY's plink module; each has its
attractions and drawbacks.
UPDATE: As of October 19th 2015, another likely candidate would
be Microsoft's OpenSSH for Windows.
* XYZMODEM file-transfer protocol will need to be totally redone for
Open Source (the K95 XYZMODEM code was licensed from a company).
Failing that, there will be no XYZMODEM support.
* Kerberos security needs to be changed from MIT to Heimdal, or just
dropped.
* The result needs to support large files.
* The result needs to be buildable with GCC or other open compiler
rather than require proprietary Microsoft tools.
* The result will rejoin the main C-Kermit development branch as one
of the platforms for which C-Kermit is built.
What is Kermit 95?
Kermit 95 is Kermit software for Microsoft Windows: briefly, terminal
emulation, file transfer, and scripting of communication tasks over a
variety of communication methods (serial port, modem, Telnet, SSH, etc).
Let me state it another way: K95 is probably the best terminal
emulator ever, and also the most powerful in terms of automation and
customization features. It is designed and best suited for people who
are comfortable with text-mode user interfaces and command languages,
and who are good typists, because you can do just about everything in
K95 without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard. It has its own
built-in programming language (similar to Unix shell scripting, but
different) so you can easily automate repetitive or error-prone tasks.
It has unparalleled key mapping and keystroke macro capabilities. It
supports terminal emulation in many languages (English, Spanish, German,
Icelandic, Greek, Russian, Vietnamese... see for yourself) and
almost every known character encoding (ASCII, ISO646, ISO8859, UTF-8, PC
and Windows code pages, and on and on). And it supports inline
transfer of both text and binary files in both directions within your
terminal session. It takes some effort to learn how to use it, but that
effort is well spent because you will be orders-of-magnitude more
efficient in your online sessions.
The Columbia University Kermit Project was a pioneer in open software,
founded years before the GNU project or Free Software Foundation. Our
software source code was openly published and shared long before the term
Open Source was invented. Kermit 95 was the Kermit Project's first and
only commercial product, developed and published to generate income to
help fund the project and its noncommercial products at a time when the
Kermit Project had to pay for itself or disappear.
As of July 1, 2011, there is no more Kermit Project at Columbia
University, and all Kermit software has become Open Source. The last K95
release was version 2.1.3 in 2003 but it has not yet been released in
usable (executable) form because more work is required, and nobody is
being paid to this any more. The new Open Source version will have a lot
of improvements, but will also lack (at least at first) some previous
features that can't be made into Open Source (e.g. some proprietary code
that we licensed). But it will be free for everybody to download, install,
use, and modify.
Why work on Kermit 95?
* It's retro! Experience the look and feel of computing as it was at the
height of the timesharing era, circa 1975-95.
* It's handmade by real programmers.
* It is unbelievably handy for sysadmin, website development and
administration, software development, scripting, and other backoffice
tasks. See the Kermit Script Library for examples.
* Kermit 95 is one of a family of programs that run on many different
operating systems and platforms, offering a uniform and compatible
repertoire of functions, commands, and programmability, allowing the
same scripted procedures to operate on Windows, Linux and all other
Unix varieties (old and new), and VMS. The basis for all these
programs is C-Kermit, which has been evolving all these years
since K95 was last released, so the last release of K95 lags far
behind in its scripting capabilities. The new release (as it stands)
is fully integrated with C-Kermit 9.0.
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