Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!sun-barr!decwrl!shelby!portia!name
From: name@portia.Stanford.EDU (tony cooper)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: guide to using the wsmr-simtel20.army.mil via FTP
Summary: Notes for Macs connected to the ARPANET
Message-ID: <4268@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 4 Aug 89 23:23:17 GMT
References: <43841@bbn.COM>
Sender: tony cooper <name@Portia.stanford.edu>
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 34


If you have a Macintosh connected to the net and want to use FTP to
download files from simtel20 you may have problems if your version
of FTP does not support tenex (or L 8 ) mode. Eg SU MAC/IP does not
have tenex mode and maybe BYU Telnet does not either. It is necessary
to use tenex mode since simtel20 has nine bit bytes wheras the Mac
has 8 bit bytes.

You can do the following:

1) Tell the simtel20 FTP server to go into tenex mode. This is done by
sending the literal string "type L 8" to the simtel20 server. How to do
this depends on your FTP program but in SU MAC/IP there is a menu item
to do this. This works because then simtel20 send the file in tenex mode
even though you are receiving in ordinary binary mode.

If you can't do that then you can:

2) Use binary mode to download the program then convert the file into
the 8 bit mode when it is on the Mac. This is easy - I wrote a simple
program to do it. I'll send anyone a copy if they need it. Note that
after the conversion the file still has a Macbinary header in front.
Use binhex 5.0 or an equivalent program to fix this.

If you can't do that then:

3) Go through a UNIX machine to do it. NCSA Telnet users have to do this
anyway. It beats me why NCSA Telnet only has an FTP server, not a client.
It makes the program useless for anonymous FTP's.

Tony Cooper
name@portia.stanford.edu

Disclaimer. Half of the above is not true. The rest is false.