+ PL/I, Snobol, LISP, Bliss, and Smalltalk. The language itself is built
+ upon the command language of the much-loved [36]DECSYSTEM-20 from the
+ 1970s and 80s, the Clipper Ship of the Text Era. (Text is not a bad
+ word. Those of us who can touch-type and who are proficient in
+ text-based computing environments like Unix shell or VMS DCL are likely
+ to be orders of magnitude more productive than users of GUIs.)
+
+ Thanks to (at least) Jeff Altman, William Bader, Ian Beckwith, Nelson
+ Beebe, Gerry Belanger, Joop Boonen, Rob Brown, Christian Corti, Alexey
+ Dokuchaev, John Dunlap, Peter Eichhorn, Carl Friedberg, Terry Kennedy,
+ Günter Knauf, Jason Lehr, Arthur Marsh, Lewis McCarthy, Gary Mills, Ed
+ Ravin, Jonathan Reams, Mike Rechtman, Mark Sapiro, Steven Schweda
+ (SMS), Kinjal Shah, Michael Sokolov, Andy Tanenbaum, Seth Theriault,
+ Zach A. Thomas, Martin Vorländer, and Eric Weaver for assistance, and
+ to Hewlett-Packard Company for support.
+
+ - Frank da Cruz [37]fdc@columbia.edu, 30 June 2011
+
+ P.S. It occurred to me just before the end of the day that maybe I
+ should back up the Kermit website on DVD, just in case. Using
+ [38]Kermit 95 on the desktop over an SSH connection to the Unix file
+ system where the website resides, I made a fresh directory on the PC,
+ CD'd to it, and on Unix cd'd to the Website directory, and told
+ C-Kermit 9.0 to:
+
+C-Kermit> send /recursive /dotfiles /nobackup *
+
+ and it re-created the website directory tree in the PC directory, text
+ files correctly converted to Windows format and binary files correctly
+ left as-is. The /dotfiles switch means to include files such as
+ .htaccess whose names start with a dot (period), and the /nobackup
+ switch means to skip backup files created by EMACs (such as
+ index.html.~243~). And then I did the same with the FTP sites, about
+ 8GB in all. Watching the file-transfer display was kind of like having
+ 30 years of my life flash before my eyes in a few minutes. Then I
+ copied the two directories to DVD (the FTP site had to be split over 2
+ DVDs). The whole operation took under half an hour. The directory tree
+ on the CD is directly usable in Windows, Unix, or any other operating
+ system (unlike if I had transferred the files all in binary mode or all
+ in text mode, or if I had made, say, a gzipped tar archive or a zip
+ archive). I believe that, to this day, Kermit is the only software that
+ can do this. If someday I have to upload from these DVDs to Unix, VMS,
+ or any other operating system, it can be done exactly the same way,
+ with any necessary conversions on text files done automatically, and
+ binary files left intact, recursively through a whole very large
+ directory tree.