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

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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  • (Score: 1) by Cornwallis on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:18PM

    by Cornwallis (359) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:18PM (#267971)

    Chuck's Zmodem was the first shareware software I paid for in 1989 I believe it was. I still have that original 3.5" diskette and it still is readable and works.

    I was jazzed at how fast it was compared to Xmodem. I miss the BBS days.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:02PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:02PM (#267987)

    I believe the diskette is readable, but how have you kept a floppy drive functioning all these years?

    So many had rubber belts in the mechanism...

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:22PM (#267996)

      I don't think In have seen rubber belts in any half-height floppy drives. The main spindle used a direct induction motor, and the dirve head uses a screw. There may be belts I over-looked though.

    • (Score: 1) by Cornwallis on Wednesday November 25 2015, @06:04PM

      by Cornwallis (359) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @06:04PM (#268079)

      I've got an old Toshiba USB external drive that works just fine - like this one: http://www.pccaweb.org/images/stories/meetings/convention/brochures/16/index.html [pccaweb.org]

      Many other models are available new for $20 or so...