Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years
3 hours ago
- Kermit protocol was created in 1981 by Frank da Cruz and Bill Catchings to solve serial communication issues between diverse systems.
- It was highly adaptable from the start, handling small buffers, 7-bit links, character set translation, and error-prone lines.
- Kermit spread rapidly to MS-DOS and Unix, with C-Kermit becoming the flagship version, adding TCP, CLI, scripting, and high-speed optimizations.
- It was used in the International Space Station, hurricane sensors, postal systems, Boeing 787 manufacturing, and more.
- Today, Kermit serves as an SSH wrapper, BBS client, calculator data exchanger, firmware updater, and tool for vintage systems.
- In 2011, Columbia University canceled the project and released C-Kermit as open source under BSD license; Frank da Cruz continued maintenance until 2025.
- John Goerzen, as Debian maintainer, made patches for security, default binary transfers, added IPv6, unit tests, and fixed many bugs.
- C-Kermit 11 was released with a dedicated test suite, cross-platform CI, and a new Open Kermit project for future development.
- The release is dedicated to Frank da Cruz for his 44 years of involvement with Kermit.