Qmodem was an

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

telecommunications program and

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termin ...

. Qmodem was widely used to access bulletin boards in the 1980s and was well respected in the

Bulletin Board System A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

community. Qmodem was also known as Qmodem SST and QmodemPro.

History

Qmodem was developed by John Friel III in 1984 and sold as shareware through a company called The Forbin Project. Qmodem gained in popularity very quickly because it was much faster and had many new features compared to

PC-Talk PC-Talk is a communications software program. It was one of the first three widely popular software products sold via the marketing method that became known as shareware. It was written by Andrew Fluegelman in late 1982, and helped created sharew ...

, the dominant shareware IBM PC communications program of that time. Originally developed in

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

Turbo Pascal Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Pascal (programming language), Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS. It was originally develo ...

, the application originally supported the Xmodem protocol, gradually added support for other protocols such as the popular

Zmodem ZMODEM is an inline 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, ...

protocol and

CompuServe CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the world – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the oth ...

-specific protocols such as CIS-B and CIS-B+. Qmodem evolved to include features such as the ability to host a simple

. The application was sold to

Mustang Software Mustang Software, Inc. was a California-based corporation that developed telecommunications software products. Mustang was incorporated in 1988, became a public corporation (NASDAQ ticker symbol MSTG) in 1995, and was finally merged into Quintus Co ...

in 1991 and in 1992 version 5 of the program was released.

Qmodem Pro

It is a successor of Qmodem, by Mustang Software, Inc. Several versions had been released for

and for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

with the final version being QmodemPro 2.1 for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

and

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

which was released July 7, 1997. QmodemPro continued to be sold by Mustang Software through 2000 when the rights to it were purchased by

Quintus Corporation Quintus is a male given name derived from '' Quintus'', a common Latin forename (''praenomen'') found in the culture of ancient Rome. Quintus derives from Latin word ''quintus'', meaning "fifth". Quintus is an English masculine given name and ...

. Its status is now

abandonware Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no official support is available. Within an intellectual rights contextual background, abandonware is a software (or hardware) sub-case of the g ...

Awards

*1992 John Friel received the Dvorak Award for his development of Qmodem. *1994 Mustang Software, Inc., received the Dvorak Award for QmodemPro for Windows.

Qodem

An independent

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

re-implementation of Qmodem for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

systems called Qodem started development in 2003. Qodem is in active development and has features common to modern communications programs, such as

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

display, and support for the

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

and

ssh The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on a ...

network protocols. It has also been ported to

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References

External links