Yeah, but getting Kermit properly configured required the blood of three chickens and a wizard. Z-Modem had sane defaults right out of the box.

Yeah this was a while ago. ;) My experience was that zmodem was incredibly fast under real-world conditions. It really was like getting a speed boost on your 300 or 1200 baud (or 2400 baud, if you were lucky!) pipe. Anyone remember xmodem or ymodem as well?

EDIT: I didn't realize he'd written ymodem as well! What a brilliant guy.