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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.
(Score: 2, Informative) by rob_on_earth on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:33PM
BBS fans could do worse than check out this free 8 part documentary for free on the internet archive web site. I am pretty sure ZMODEM came up but I did watch it a couple of years ago.
https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary [archive.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @10:16AM
Who also runs textfiles.com and was working at archive.org (last I checked) helping them roll out ever bigger NAS to help store all the data they have to pick and choose amongst on a daily basis as their old storage fills up.
As someone who lived through the later stages of the BBS era ('92-'98, when everything started drying up.) I can attest that it was an interesting time, filled with interesting software, and despite all the hate of DOS, it and the many bbses running on it managed to provide a huge source of technological development that lead to many of the things we take for granted today.