[Simh] text from openvms

[Ethan Dicks]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 9:16 PM, Bill Cunningham <billcun at suddenlink.net> wrote:
> People tell me kermit in vms can be a pain.

We used Kermit on VMS everyday back in the 80s.  It was terrific.  You
do have to know how to use Kermit (the default option settings aren't
always the best choice) and you have to understand that files on VMS
are record-oriented not streams-of--bytes, so moving *binary* files
to/from VMS is not so trivial (EXEs aren't bad because they are
fixed-length 512-byte record and you can tell Kermit what you are up
to so you write the correct format on the VMS side, .OLB and other
types of random-length-record files aren't so easy - we used to wrap
binaries up in a text format that preserved the record-size meta-data
and send text files.  Kermit is superb at that).  It's not Kermit that
makes this "difficult", it's RMS on VMS that makes it more complicated
than files on UNIX or DOS or whatever else.  All heterogenous file
transfer techniques have the same hurdles.

So since your use-case is moving text in and out of VMS, Kermit is an
excellent choice that is not difficult to set up.

-ethan