Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <1990Jul24.022539.4278@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Jul13.022224.25441@lth.se> <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <7647@gollum.twg.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 90 02:25:39 GMT

In article <7647@gollum.twg.com> david@twg.com (David S. Herron) writes:
>BITNET won't be able to handle any 8-bit file format very easily.

It doesn't handle 7-bit file formats very reliably, actually; Bitnet has
all kinds of ugly properties as a transmission subsystem.  However, with
a suitable encoding it can still be used to get clean 8-bit data from
point A to point B.  The bencode/bdecode stuff shipped with C News,
originally written at Waterloo, is Bitnet-proof by design.  (Uuencode
is not, by the way.)
-- 
NFS:  all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and its performance and security too.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry