Date: Mon, 17 Mar 97 18:40:53 EST
From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu
To: skp@unixg.ubc.ca
Subject: Kermit 95 Review

Hi. We sent you Kermit 95 for review, and see the result in the latest OS/2 Computing magazine... Thanks!

However, I asked that we be shown a draft of the review prior to publication so we could check it for correctness (not opinion). As it stands, it has several mistakes:

It is not shareware. It must be purchased. Single copies cost $54 in the USA (and include the two printed manuals, a total of over 700 pages). Very inexpensive bulk and site licenses are also available.
230400 bps is supported as a serial speed.
You say "no instant help interface" -- actually, there is a Help command available in both the GUI dialer and at the command prompt.
"No ISDN Support". Well, no explicit ISDN support, but it works fine with any ISDN connection that has a COM-port-like driver, such as PAPI.
The review seems to imply that REXX must be used for scripting. In fact, Kermit also has its own cross-platform script programming language, in addition to REXX. Kermit scripts are portable to hundreds of platforms where REXX is not available. It's easy to use because it is exactly the same as the Kermit command language.

Also a couple small quibbles:

I would not agree that a communication program should send AT to all the ports it can find. This is dangerous. First of all, not all modems use the AT command set, so it won't find such modems. Second, you can't assume AT is harmless command to devices that are not modems -- what if the "launch nuclear missiles" device was attached to COM2, and "AT" was its launch code? Third, how do we know we are not going to interfere with some other process that is already active on one of these devices? Etc etc.
You say "if I needed assistance in a particular area in the program, I would have to pull out one of the 12 documentation files available to me, which is cumbersome". What about the printed manuals? (We sent them to you, didn't we?)

Your point about the TIMESLICE parameter is a good one -- the setup program should indeed warn you about it, and furthermore if you already have a TIMESLICE statement in CONFIG.SYS, it should give you a choice of whether to keep it or replace it. We'll do something about this in the next release. The value used by C-Kermit is recommended by IBM for OS/2 systems where communication software is installed and might be run in the background.

Thanks again for the review.

- Frank