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The Kermit Project
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Now hosted by
Panix.com
New York City USA
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kermit@kermitproject.org
…since
1981
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Home | C-Kermit | E-Kermit | Kermit 95 | Scripts | News | About | FAQ |
April 2022: CLICK HERE to see a way of connecting K95 2.1.3 from 2003 to modern SSH servers from home networks.
November 2021: Finishing this project has become an urgent matter now that the OpenSSH 7.4 has become widespread; this release has removed all of the ciphers supported by K95's SSH client. K95 supports Telnet-SSL and Telnet-Kerberos, but secure Telnet never caught on and as far as I know, secure Telnet servers are found nowhere on the public Internet.
CLICK HERE to see the original K95 source code page, which is obsolete now but which still has some useful background information.
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. Here are the two projects in their most recent snapshots:
Project 2 is built on Linux with the mingw32 cross-compiler and includes the features of Project 1 plus a prototype of plink-based SSH (which doesn't really do the job because there is no close coordination between the K95 process and the separate Plink process; that's why it needs to be a library).
Both versions are pretty close to being buildable with GCC.
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. Click here for a Kermit 95 tutorial.
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. The Open Source version has not yet been released in usable (executable) form yet because more work is required, and nobody is being paid to this any more. It 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.