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Chuck Forsberg, Author of ZModem, Dead at 71

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @12:11PM   
from the another-tech-pioneer-passed-away dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Chuck Forsberg died on September 24, 2015, in Portland, Oregon. He was 71.

Chuck was a man of many accomplishments. He exhibited a multi-faceted persona that friends, family, loved ones and even Chuck would acknowledge, was at times quirky and contradictory.

Chuck Forsberg was:

• An intellectual genius, who always seeded his ideas, accomplishments and creations with a stiff measure of pragmatic common sense.
• A technical engineer who was as comfortable writing the English language as he was writing computer code or designing electronic circuits.
• Someone who couldn't remember people's names or faces, but retained the complex details of electronic circuits he had designed 40 years earlier.
• That rare engineer who combined expertise and proficiency in both software and hardware engineering.
• A self-taught and self-described "know-it-all" on nutrition and diet, while conceding being as much as 200 pounds overweight.

Chuck was the author of ZMODEM:

a file transfer protocol developed by Chuck Forsberg in 1986, in a project funded by Telenet in order to improve file transfers on their X.25 network. In addition to dramatically improved performance compared to older protocols, ZMODEM also offered restartable transfers, auto-start by the sender, an expanded 32-bit CRC, and control character quoting, allowing it to be used on networks that might "eat" control characters. ZMODEM became extremely popular on bulletin board systems (BBS) in the early 1990s, displacing earlier protocols such as XMODEM and YMODEM.

Ahh, memories of the days of using Procomm Plus on a 1200 baud N81 connection.

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Original Submission

• Zmodem Zmodem (Score: 4, Informative) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 25 2015, @12:31PM

  by jdavidb (5690) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @12:31PM (#267964) Homepage Journal

  Thanks, Chuck. Back in 1996, ZModem was the only way I had to get stuff from my university shell account to my Mac LC III over my 33.6 modem. It was a great discovery, too; for a long time I did not know it was possible. Among other things, with ZModem I painstakingly transferred NetBSD floppy disks to my local system so I could install my first UNIX. The rest is history.

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• Re:Zmodem (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:03PM

  by CoolHand (438) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:03PM (#267970) Journal

  Indeed.. Zmodem was always my favorite protocol... He has my thanks.

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• Re:Zmodem (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:58PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:58PM (#267985)

  rz & sz forever!

  Also my first exposure to the concept of "sliding windows."

  Parent