ECAAA.HLP                                                   August, 1991

The files whose names start with EC are a version of Kermit for CICS on
the IBM 370-series mainframe.  This version is based upon a very old
release of MVS/TSO Kermit, and it was adapted to CICS by the programmers
at the International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information
(ICSTI) in Moscow, USSR, and presented to Columbia at the First
International Kermit Conference in Moscow, May, 1989.  Programmers
should be aware of the environment for which this program was written.

First, it is for an IBM/370-compatible computer, called an EC 2157 (in
Cyrillic, ES in Roman -- "Edinaja Systema"), running a very old
version of MVS written for this computer by the firm Robotron in what
was then the German Democratic Republic.  These MVS and CICS versions
are largely compatible with the IBM versions of the same vintage.

Second, the EC computer uses a special version of EBCDIC (named DKOI)
which supports the Cyrillic character set.  For communication with ASCII
terminals, this CICS Kermit uses (together with CICS itself) a 7-bit
character set, which is similar to ASCII, except that the lowercase
ASCII letters have been replaced by uppercase Cyrillic letters in as
phonetic a way as possible.  This means that (1) all character-set
related phenomena in the program, such as the ASCII-EBCDIC translation
tables, will be specific to the Russian language, and (2) many of the
comments are in Russian, written in the DKOI character set.  If you
understand Russian, you should be able to decipher the comments.

Third, the Russians refer to the program, and the protocol itself, as
"Courier" rather than "Kermit", since they were worried about copyright
restrictions.  They have since been assurred that they are free to use
the name "Kermit".

Aside from these differences, it appears that this program should be
suitable for use on US IBM models, but only for the linemode TTY
communication environment, not the full-screen 3270 environment.  A
more recent Kermit for CICS, suitable for full-screen operation, can
be found under the prefix IKX (a variant of the "Portable 370"
Kermit).

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Date: Tue, 11 Jul 89 10:13:19 EDT
From: "Wayne S. Mery" <LUWSM%LEHIIBM1@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu>
Subject: CICS Kermit

 o The code compiles cleanly (and should execute) with 2 exceptions:
   1) Reference to what is possibly an IBM source code macro PPTNXTEN, used to
      find the PPT entry of the transalate table/program.  This
      should be easily replace by application macro or command level equivalent
      EXEC CICS LOAD PROGRAM('name') SET(addr) LENGTH(set-prog-len)  {HOLD}
   2) The obvious lack of the translate table.  The default in their code
      is named COURSTND.  It is probably customized anyway and would
      need replacement in other countries.
 o program size is small at 17K
 o Available commands are APPEND, DEBUG, DELAY, FILE, PACKET, PREFIX, PROMPT,
   QUOTE, RECORD, RETRY, TRT
 o only supported destination/source of transfer within CICS is intrapartition
   and extra partition datasets (DCT)
 o There seems to be extensive error checking/messages as regards problems at
   the host end.  

Wayne S. Mery, Systems Programmer      Lehigh University    (215)758-3983

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