Kermit project terminals that were thrown out in 2006; see explanatory text below the images.
One of the things I enjoyed most when working on Kermit was the ability to travel the world and meet users wherever I went. Frank, and to a lesser extent myself, acquired a large number of manuals, terminals, software, and computers and more that by the time they came into our possession were already facing extinction.After my departure from Columbia University in 2003 Frank was forced to scrap a large number of items because my office space was no longer available for storage. Some of the equipment which was destroyed in that purging were military terminals whose manuals were labeled top secret. They came into my possession on a drive from Charlotte NC to New York through Virginia where a concerned soul literally met me behind an abandoned warehouse and the machines and manuals fell off the back of a truck into my back seat.
I am particularly concerned about the loss of the early and rare terminals because in my time working with them I found the manuals to be frequently lacking in accuracy. The only way to know how the actual terminal sequence parser would behave was to write test sequences and pass them through the physical machine. The manuals were nice to have but without the terminal, an accurate emulator could never be developed.
Created by Photogallery 3.09 April 6, 2021 |