The Kermit file transfer protocol was designed at the Columbia University Center for Computing Activities (CUCCA) in 1981-82 mainly by Bill Catchings and Frank da Cruz. The initial objective was to allow users of DEC-20 and IBM timesharing systems to archive their files on microcomputer floppy disks.
Kermit was then presented at conferences of user groups, and began to be requested from other sites. Since the creators had written down a description of the protocol, some sites wrote their own implementations for new computers, or adapted existing ones to run on additional systems, and sent back these new versions to Columbia University so that they could be shared with other people.
In this way now Kermit supports more than 100 different systems.