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 op ...

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 term ...

. 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 a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running list of BBS software, software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user perfor ...

(BBS) community. Qmodem was also known as Qmodem SST and Qmodem Pro.

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 computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

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

, the application originally supported the

XMODEM XMODEM is a simple file transfer protocol developed as a quick hack by Ward Christensen for use in his 1977 MODEM.ASM terminal program. It allowed users to transmit files between their computers when both sides used MODEM. Keith Petersen made a ...

protocol, gradually added support for other protocols such as the popular ZMODEM protocol and

CompuServe CompuServe, Inc. (CompuServe Information Service, Inc., also known by its initialism CIS or later CSi) was an American Internet company that provided the first major commercial online service provider, online service. It opened in 1969 as a times ...

-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 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 Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

with the final version being QmodemPro 2.1 for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

and

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

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.

Awards

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

Software

Qmodem

Qmodem was available as

software for

operating systems. Qmodem supported the following file transfer protocols: *

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

''(plain text transfer)'' *

-Checksum ''(128 byte block with 8-bit

checksum A checksum is a small-sized block of data derived from another block of digital data for the purpose of detecting errors that may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. By themselves, checksums are often used to verify dat ...

)'' * XMODEM-Relaxed ''(XMODEM-Checksum with relaxed error timing)'' * XMODEM-CRC ''(128 byte block with 16-bit CRC)'' * XMODEM-1K ''(1024 byte block with 16-bit CRC)'' *

YMODEM YMODEM is a file transfer protocol used between microcomputers connected together using modems. It was primarily used to transfer files to and from bulletin board systems. YMODEM was developed by Chuck Forsberg as an expansion of XMODEM and was f ...

-Batch * ZMODEM-Batch * XMODEM-1K/G ''(requires a MNP compatible error-correcting modem)'' * YMODEM/G-Batch ''(requires a MNP compatible error-correcting modem)'' * Kermit ''(via external program)'' * Puma ''(via external program)''

Qmodem Pro

Qmodem Pro was available as paid commercial software for

operating systems, then later for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating systems.

Qodem

An independent

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

re-implementation of Qmodem for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix 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 Uni ...

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

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

display, and support for the

telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

and ssh network protocols. It has also been ported to

, and compatible with

and later versions of Windows.Softpedia download page
/ref> It can be compiled with

Borland C++ Borland C++ was a C and C++ IDE (integrated development environment) released by Borland for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. It was the successor to Turbo C++ and included a better debugger, the Turbo Debugger, which was written in protected mo ...

5.02 or

Microsoft Visual C++ Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++, C++/CLI and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available i ...

6.0.

References

External links

*Mustang Software, Inc. page
QmodemPro
*

1984 software Shareware DOS software Windows software Communication software Discontinued software Free communication software Free terminal emulators Software clones {{DOS-stub

History

Qmodem Pro

Awards

Software

Qmodem

Qmodem Pro

Qodem

See also

References

External links