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: 4, Informative) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 25 2015, @12:31PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:03PM
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:58PM
rz & sz forever!
Also my first exposure to the concept of "sliding windows."
(Score: 1) by Cornwallis on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:18PM
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
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
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
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...
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:41PM
A day late, a dollar short.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @03:05PM
We'll make it up to Mr. Forsberg the next time he's in the news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:54PM
I found this out a few days ago. His heirs are selling the omen.com website, but in doing so they have killed the ftp site which had some stuff linked from the web page that I wanted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @03:29PM
but in doing so they have killed the ftp site
Probably not... Sounds like the hardware went south too...
The hardware that housed Chuck Forsberg's WWW.OMEN.COM site has crashed See http://www.omen.com/ [omen.com]
(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.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:11PM
That's because there were no letters left for the competition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:12PM
Developed the best file transfer protocol of its day with much needed features.
I used Zmodem early and until the internet obsoleted the BBS.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @06:08PM
NO CARRIER
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:05PM
Software lives forever!!
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:48PM
Yes, a century from now, people will still be using ZMODEM!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @12:14AM
What, you don't use ZMODEM to read SoylentNews?
(Score: 2) by No Respect on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:07PM
First software I ever paid for. There was a shareware version and YAM was the commercial version. Yet Another Modem was the source of the acronym YAM. It did Kermit transfers as well which you really needed if you dealt with mainframe systems of the time. I recall the pre-ethernet days when I once wired my own crossover RS-232 connectors so I could transfer files back and forth between 2 PCs without needing to use diskettes. The sheer joy and delight of seeing YAM successfully handle the transfer on both ends for the very first time over that homemade cable was something very special.
I still have that cable. And the original YAM diskette and documentation that came with it.