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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: 0, Troll) by Freeman on Wednesday November 25 2015, @04:18PM
Not. Seriously, who would want to go back to dial-up? The thought shouldn't be for the extremely ancient and now useless tech that he invented back in the day. It's that without people like him we wouldn't be where we are today.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:15PM
At least there were no pop-ads and screwball JavaScript making the screen ooze and dance all funny. Interfaces were lean and simple because ads and eye candy took too long to load.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:29PM
Just because they were the "good old days" doesn't mean the poster was suggesting we go back, moron.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:35PM
Seriously, if I could get CompuServer as I used to have it and the program I used which collected headlines/etc. into a "newspaper" for me, I'd go back to dial up in a heartbeat.