Kermit had licensing issues in those days. And many bbs were focused on one specific system so many of the auto translate and nice compatibility features of Kermit weren’t that important.
replyAnd finally Kermit didn’t have great defaults especially compared to ymodem and zmodem. So getting good performance out of Kermit was much harder than the others.
All of that added up to much lower adoption outside of the mainframe world.
The very oldest (early 80s) Kermit implementations were limited to 96-byte packets. Kermit gained support for 4K and 9K jumbo frames, sliding windows, etc., and was generally faster than ZModem -- when there was a modern implementation. But a lot of BBSs (and also client-side communication software) did their own from-scratch Kermit implementation, which was tiny packets and no sliding windows, so it was slow. There's some discussion of it here: https://www.kermitproject.org/misconceptions.html#notslow
replyThis is what I remember. Kermit hated latency, and dial up modems had that in spades. It was much slower than Z-Modem for pushing files around.
replyGOO. I remember Punter well.
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