Kermit was still useful into the 90s. I had a brief gig helping a friends dad set up an ecom store. Their payment processor got nightly batches of authorizations and captures by model. We were having issues getting our machine to talk with their machine, and surprisingly enough I was able to get an actual engineer on the phone. We used kermit to debug the modem handshake interactively while we conversed, figuring out the magic Hayes incantation to get them happy.

A very different world than today.