On 5/8/2020 9:32 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: ? OK, thanks for the info. I doubt I'll find a driver to use, and don't have time to write one. For this project, looks like it's time for me to Kermit like it's 1989. -- Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR Control-G Consultants lee.gleason at comcast.net -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

True.? Kermit can be tuned to be pretty fast.? In 2001, when the KLH10 micro-engine became generally available, Frank da Cruz (one of the original authors) updated the Tops-20 version to support long packets.? The Tops-20 version is one of the two original versions (the other being the 'micro' version). I have a bit of a background in Kermit.? I had the office across the hall from Frank in 710 Watson and he was my boss for several years.? Here is the actual reason Kermit was created and why it does some of the things it does.? Around 1982, the first micro showed up at Columbia.? I don't remember the model, but it wasn't anything IBM.? I think maybe it was a SuperBee running CP/M.? The floppy drives on it were immediately recognized by staff as a good solution to user storage which we were perennially short of.? This was a common problem with time-sharing sites that did not have direct funding models. So getting data down from the 20 was pretty easy; you just check parity and, at 4800 baud, the micro could keep up because it? had nothing else to do.? That wasn't the case with uploads.? Shove too much data into RSX20F of the time and it would roll over and drop dead.? There was some eventual logic put in to determine whether a line might hyper-active or ringing, but that hadn't happened, yet.? This isn't anything against the front end; it was designed with DH11 fifo's in mind and users who, in bursts, could /maybe/ do 10 characters a second (I.E., about 110 baud). The front end's dismise would drop carrier on the remote terminals, promptly throwing all the poor users off.? And then all of them would desperately try to get on again in order to not lose their work.? So the poor front end would finish rebooting only to suffer the same fate again and again...?? You had to come in via a network virtual terminal and run a program that could tell you what was going on (by SNOOP%'ing BIGBUF) to figure out what was going on. So we made some experiments to determine what the maximum length of the line was that the front end could swallow before being choking.? It also turned out that there were some input characters that weren't particularly welcome, either.? That's why Kermit quotes control characters and some other things and had an input line length of between 64 and 70 characters. But it's not exactly 1989.? I got a hold of Tops-20 in early 2003 and immediately set about fixing bugs, polishing things up and generally making myself at home.? Why?? The performance of the BBN FTP server was pretty awful, but I didn't immediately see why (even thought I fixed some bugs).? It eventually got to the point that I punted it and rewrote the whole thing from scratch.? Download speeds went from 10's of kilobits to low megabits; about a %1,500 increase.? Uploads were another problem; they just wedged.? This behavior happens with FAL, too.? I remember using the NI (and CI) and the direction of the transfer did not make any difference in speed. So the problem appears to be the NI simulator, which I've been looking at on and off.? I had to make some changes to it in order for DECnet to come up seamlessly on Ubuntu.? Problem is, I'd rather hack assembler.? I'll get to it. Were it not for Kermit, I wouldn't have anyway to get anything into the 20 except by virtual tapes (which work fine). Naturally, I found a couple of bugs and other things that annoyed me, so I made some updates and gave them to Frank and MRC.? My last change was in March of 2005 (I'm SLOGIN). The maximum rate that I've been able to upload to the 20 over either LAT or TVT is about 3,000 baud, still with a line length of 70.? Better than nothing...