jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (09/04/87)
David Young and John Dunning (both authors of kermit download programs themselves) pointed out to me that my suggestion of modifying the Avatex Modem people's "dumb terminal" BASIC program to download files contained a -- how shall I put it -- an oversimplification. (There, that doesn't make me sound too stupid now, does it?!) Unfortunately, -- since it really would be nice to have such a simple, type-in program -- in order to do disk I/O on the serial bus, you have to shut down or at least suspend RS-232 port operations. So just redirecting the output from the screen to the disk won't work. It gets pretty complicated, apparently. If anybody is working on the problem, one suggestion both Dunning and Young made was to buffer the data internally, presumably in a very long string variable, then after transmission was complete, to copy it out to a file. There would be a fairly stringent limit on file size that could be handled, like (wild guess) maybe 10K bytes. Whatever the limit, it would be too small to handle a program as big as CDY's OmniCom or Dunning's kermit65 in one chunk. It would be possible to break it up into 4 or so chunks and send them as separate files, then reassemble them at the other end. Another possibility would be to write an intermediate version of the program that has the flow control trickery in it to handle large files but is not a really nice, full-featured terminal emulator. But it could be short enough to download in one block, using the rudimentary, type-in version. Somebody out there who really needs it, please volunteer to be the chief nagger and tester! I apologize for my error. In my defense I can only say that anybody who got snookered into trying to make the program work will undoubtedly have learned a lot in the process! -John Sangster