I remember mostly ignoring Kermit back in my BBSing days; by the time "SuperKermit" came along, which could get performance competitive with ZMODEM, it alreayd seemed ancient.
Then, around 1991, a friend gave me access to his college Unix account so I could play with Gopher, Archie, and TinyFugue (the world of MUDs/MUCKs/etc.). The catch: to get to his account from my home machine, I had to call into a Florida state network that let you dial in and connect to machines on various college campuses. The network ran on some IBM minicomputer. And, it didn't connect to the Unix machine, oh no. It connected to a VAX, which was then on the same local network as the Unix machine.
So I had to dial in to the IBM machine, connect from it to a VAX, and then telnet from the VAX to the Unix box.
Incredibly, this all worked with only mildly annoying lag...but then I tried to transfer a file from the Unix machine to my personal machine. ZMODEM didn't work. XMODEM didn't work. I think I tried one or two other things that I've forgotten.
Then I remembered Kermit, and its reputation for being able to handle difficult connections. It got the file through on its first try.
Exactly my experience, the faster file transfer programs failed me on the crappy dialups of the day… but Kermit came to the rescue. As I recall it gave you a running tally of retries and all that.
For context, on the other side of the wall where we were doing this was a Cray, probably a Cray 1. The one with the bench seating in a semicircle on top of cooling hardware.
I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).
Trumpet Winsock in PPP mode, or SLIP ATTACH or invoking a SLIP server daemon upon login, worked with UCF/UF library VAX systems back then. Just needed to use CTRL-C to break out of their login scripts and get a prompt.
Then, around 1991, a friend gave me access to his college Unix account so I could play with Gopher, Archie, and TinyFugue (the world of MUDs/MUCKs/etc.). The catch: to get to his account from my home machine, I had to call into a Florida state network that let you dial in and connect to machines on various college campuses. The network ran on some IBM minicomputer. And, it didn't connect to the Unix machine, oh no. It connected to a VAX, which was then on the same local network as the Unix machine.
So I had to dial in to the IBM machine, connect from it to a VAX, and then telnet from the VAX to the Unix box.
Incredibly, this all worked with only mildly annoying lag...but then I tried to transfer a file from the Unix machine to my personal machine. ZMODEM didn't work. XMODEM didn't work. I think I tried one or two other things that I've forgotten.
Then I remembered Kermit, and its reputation for being able to handle difficult connections. It got the file through on its first try.