May 1989. Frank da Cruz and Christine Gianone of Columbia University's
Kermit Project were invited to the Soviet Union to present Kermit protocol
and sofware at a three-day conference hosted by the International Centre for
Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) in Moscow, attended by computer
experts from Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Mongolia,
Czechoslovakia, Cuba, and all over the USSR itself. The first day we gave
an overview of Kermit software and protocol; the second day we presented a
new extension to the protocol allowing transfer of text files between
computers that use different encodings (such as for Russian Cyrillic text),
developed beforehand by us in cooperation with ICSTI as well as with
scientists in Japan and elsewhere, collaborating over BITNET and the myriad
other networks that were shortly to be replaced by the worldwide Internet.
The third day was an open forum in which attendees discussed the use of
Kermit in their countries. We took about 700 pictures of which this is a
small sample, and our hosts also made a documentary film.
- Conference Report (plain text).
- Kermit News articles
- Video (MP4 243MB).
- Video files.
I'm not a big multimedia guy. The PAL-format video tape was converted to DVD by a commercial service. The Video link is to an MP4 version produced from the DVD with Handbrake; it's a little jerky. The "video files" link is to a directory that contains the files that are on the DVD, in case a better conversion is possible.
Also see: Source code
in Russian for Kermit on the EC 2157 mainframe, which we brought back
with us on a tape from ICSTI and decoded (using methods known only to the
Kermit Project) from Cyrillic EBCDIC to Unicode.
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Frank da Cruz, Columbia University Computing History. Created 20 May 2011 by photoalbum