[9][10] BLAST grew out of the mission-critical experience of providing air pollution telemetry within the dial-up communications environment of the petroleum belt of southern Louisiana and Texas, with not only noisy telephone lines but also unexpected satellite hops to remote locations.
Its original version was designed and implemented for the Data General line of Nova minicomputers[17][18] by G. W. Smith, a former BorgWarner Research Center systems engineer who, having developed a basic "ack-nak" protocol for the aforesaid telemetry application, now created an entirely new protocol with all of the above-mentioned features, and for which he devised the "BLAST" acronym.
[11][12] On the downside, BLAST was criticized by ZMODEM developer Chuck Forsberg because of its proprietary nature, making it "tightly bound to the fortunes of [its supplier]".
[21][22][11][12] As representative of one of CRG's mature products, the BLAST-II file transfer software was distinguished by its wide range of features.
Beyond supporting the BLAST protocol, it enabled use of the competing XMODEM,[23] encrypted and transmitted data using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and had "versions for about a hundred different micros, minis, and mainframes".