Date: Mon, 8 Aug 94 12:08:04 EDT
From: tytso@MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
To: othomas@MIT.EDU
Cc: brlewis@MIT.EDU, jweiss@MIT.EDU, mhbraun@MIT.EDU, othomas@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: oliver thomas's message of Mon, 08 Aug 1994 11:05:30 EDT,
	<9408081505.AA16308@bombardier.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: kermit on Athena 
Address: 1 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: (617) 253-8091

   Reply-To: othomas@MIT.EDU
   Date: Mon, 08 Aug 1994 11:05:30 EDT
   From: "oliver thomas" <othomas@MIT.EDU>

   This is an update of the kermit/zmodem situation from the consulting end of
   things. 

   partly because the kermit client for the Mac, as far as I have seen,
   is in dismal shape. It's old, does not support windowing, and has
   been known to crash reliably on PowerMacs and Centrises.

It sounds like you are using the kermit described below:

>The last formal release of Mac Kermit was 0.9(40) in 1988.  Unfortunately,
>it does not work very well on newer Macintoshes or Systems.  However, newer
>versions are reportedly too big for 512K Macs or below, so you'll have to
>run 0.9(40) on these old models.

However, there is apparently a newer, ALPHA mac kermit which is based on
the newer C-Kermit 5A, which does support windowing.  It's not
necessarily much more stable, though:

>The current pre-pre-release of Mac Kermit (still far from a final release) is
>0.99(189), based on C-Kermit 5A(189).  It is available via anonymous FTP from
>watsun.cc.columbia.edu [128.59.39.2], directory kermit/b.  A comprehensive
>user manual will be published when the final release is complete.  Sorry, I
>can't give any reasonable estimate about when that will be.

Unfortunately, there's a 72K "beware" file that lists outstanding bugs
and issues even with this pre-release version.  Nevertheless, it's
probably worth taking a look at it and seeing how well (or how poorly)
it works.

You can find the Mac Kermit files on watsun.cc.columbia.edu, in the
following places:

    Overview file: kermit/b/ckmaaa.hlp
    Source code: kermit/b/ck[cuwm]*.[cwhr]
    Binary: kermit/b/ckmker.hqx (BinHex 4.0 format)
    Further information: kermit/b/ckmker.bwr  (the 72k beware file)

						- Ted