When data is transmitted from one computer to another, the receiving computer has to be instructed to take in the data and put it somewhere, and it also needs a way of ensuring that the data has been received correctly and completely in spite of several factors that will tend to interfere with this process, like noise (which often corrupts data), timing (data may come in faster than the receiving machine can handle it), or lines outages (a line may stop working during short periods, with a resulting data loss).
The way Kermit overwhelms these problems is to break data up into pieces and to encapsulate these pieces into packets.
The transfer is then achieved via two Kermit programs, one running on each computer, that send messages to each other.
The Kermit protocol is ``character-oriented'', because data is transmitted in the form of discrete characters, like A,B,C. Most computers agree on the characters representation: there are 128 characters, of which 95 are printable and the other 33 are reserved for control or formatting purposes (ASCII character Set).