"Generic Kermit-80" is a implementation of Kermit that should run on many
8080-compatible CP/M system with little or no modification.  Unlike other
Kermit-80 implementations, it contains no system-dependent manipulation of the
serial port.  All I/O is done with standard CP/M BIOS calls, switching devices
by manipulating the IOBYTE.  Whether Generic Kermit runs on a particular micro
depends upon two things:

(1) Did the manufacturer fully implement the "optional" CP/M IOBYTE?

(2) Is the IOBYTE implemented "correctly?", that is, are the four fields
    defined correctly and in the right order, and do the CON:, LST:,
    PUN:, and BAT: devices indicate the devices that KERMIT expects?
    KERMIT wants the serial port to correspond to the RDR: and PUN: devices,
    and wants to be able to switch the console between the CRT: and
    BAT: devices, where BAT: should be defined to use RDR: for input
    and LST: for output.

Generic Kermit is known to run without modification on the DEC VT180 (up to
4800 baud) and the DEC Rainbow 100 (up to 1200 baud).  It was tested on the
Intertec Superbrain and failed to work because the IOBYTE did not point to the
CRT screen in the expected way.  Similarly for the DECmate-II CP/M option, but
in this case the correct IOBYTE definitions were discovered, and a "specific"
version of generic Kermit-80 was built for the DECmate II; if you look for
DMII in the CPMGENERI.ASM source file, you'll see that only a couple
definition statements were necessary to do the trick.  Generic Kermit-80 has
not yet been tested on other CP/M machines.

The other way in which generic Kermit-80 is generic is that it does not assume
anything about terminal; it does not attempt to emulate a VT52 or any other
type of terminal, and it does not use fancy screen control when updating the
screen during file transfer.  It assumes the micro has the ability to auto-
matically wrap long lines around on the screen.

The present Rainbow, Robin, and DECmate Kermits are actually generic
Kermit slightly modified to do VT100 display screen updating during
file transfer.

To get Generic Kermit on to your system (if you can't get it on a floppy
disk), use whatever procedure is available to you on your micro to download
the file KER:CPMGENERIC.HEX.  The DDT program listed in the Kermit Users
Manual will do the trick on most systems.

To modify Generic Kermit to run on a new system on which it does not run
as distributed, see the instructions in the section "Generic Kermit-80"
in the back of the Kermit Users Guide.

(June 1983)