Punter (protocol)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Punter is a generic term referring to any of various protocols for file transfer developed in the 1980s by Steve Punter, or their variants.
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[edit] PET Transfer Protocol
The PET Transfer Protocol (PTP), also known as Punter or Old Punter, was developed ca. 1980 by Steve Punter for use with his PETBBS and BBS64 bulletin board system (BBS) software. The "PET" in the name comes from the Commodore PET computer.
Compared to other contemporary protocols, PTP was quite slow and unreliable: it supported only 7-bit transfers and had a weak checksum algorithm. Nevertheless, it was widely used on Commodore PET and Commodore 64 based bulletin boards until the release of C1.
[edit] C1
C1, also known as New Punter, was developed in 1984 by Steve Punter as a successor to PTP. C1 was the standard protocol for use on Commodore BBSes, and was rarely supported by terminal or BBS software for other operating systems.
The C1 specification was rife with inaccuracies and ambiguities, making it difficult to implement from scratch. Nevertheless, the protocol came into widespread use because Punter released the source code for the original implementation into the public domain.
[edit] Technical information
C1 could transmit block sizes up to 255 bytes with a recommended (but not enforced) minimum of 40 bytes and an overhead of 7 bytes per block. It is optimized for transferring files stored on Commodore computers, whose DOS treats executable, sequential, and random-access files differently.
[edit] Multi-Punter
The term Multi-Punter can refer to any one of three or four mutually incompatible third-party variants of C1 which permit batch file transfers, as opposed to C1 which was designed for single file transfers.
One such variant, C2, also known simply as Punter, was developed circa 1985 by Steve Punter. Like C1, it is optimized for transferring files stored on Commodore computers.
Another variant was developed circa 1987 by Alan Peters.
