COMMENTS ON RUNNING KERMIT 3.0 FOR THE IBM PC UNDER MICROSOFT WINDOWS
 
Kermit 3.00 will successfully run in a window with Microsoft Windows and
will accept cut and pasted information.  Scripts and phone dialing instructions
are cases of cut and paste replacing the keyboard.  Use the PIFEDIT program to
construct a .PIF file for Kermit, following the guidelines below.
 
Program name:           KERMIT.EXE or whatever is the name of the Kermit file.
Program title:          MS-DOS Kermit 3.0
Program parameters:     Leave blank since this becomes a command line
Initial directory:      Directory, if any, to CD to when starting Kermit
Memory Requirements:    175 KB Required, xxx KB Desired (see below)
Directly Modifies:      Clear all boxes (pretend Kermit is very good)
Program Switch:         Check the Text box
Screen Exchange:        Check the Graphics/Text box
Close Window on exit:   Check the box
 
Comments.  Although Kermit does direct writes to the screen it does so in a
"TopView aware" manner.  One may check or leave empty the COM1 or COM2 boxes
even though Kermit does directly modify the serial port.  Kermit will block
(XOFF) if left running as an icon, but it will run smoothly while sharing the
screen with other tasks.  Communications throughput is limited by Windows'
character drawing speed.  Graphics are done as if you had a monochrome
adapter.  Screen dumps ( ^] F or Control End) will be of Kermit's underlying
full screen.  In summary, tell Windows that Kermit is exceptionally well
behaved.
 
If you check the modifies memory box or some of the other boxes (or if you
don't have a KERMIT.PIF file at all), then Kermit will take over the whole
screen and Windows will become inactive, and Windows features will no longer
work.  But Kermit will run much faster, and graphics will work normally.
 
If Windows complains that it does not have enough memory to run Kermit,
then you can reduce Kermit's memory requirements by allocating less memory for
rollback screens.  Kermit's default number of rollback screens is 10, and each
rollback screen takes about 8K of memory (more or less depending on the type
of display adapter you have).  With the default 10 rollback screens, Kermit
needs about 175K of memory.  You can reduce this to about 100K by getting rid
of some or all of your rollback screens; if you put a line like SET
KERMIT=ROLLBACK 5 in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, this tells Kermit how many
screens to get memory for.  If you specify 0, this will reduce Kermit's memory
requirements by about 80K.
 
Note: problems have been reported running Kermit under Windows/286 when memory
is tight.  There have been allegations that Windows fails to observe proper
etiquette, and destroys portions of memory that Kermit has dynamically
allocated from DOS, for example for macro definitions.
