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From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Universal machine-readable format?
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.165518.16675@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 90 16:55:18 GMT
Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System)
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City
Lines: 18


	If you had to send some data in machine-readable form to somebody
(perhaps many, unspecified, people), but had no idea what kind of machine
they had, what format/media would you use to maximize the probability that
it would be readable by the recipient?  The quantity of data is small enough
that storage capacity of the media should not be a significant problem, yet
large enough that a paper printout (requiring them to re-key the data) is
impractical.  Perhaps 2-20k characters of difficult to type data (I have in
mind DNA sequences, but columns of numbers fall into the same catagory).

	My first guess was a plain ascii file on a 720k 5.25" DOS floppy.
It has already been pointed out to me that some people can't read 720k
disks, so I'd do better with a 360k floppy.  Anybody have any better ideas?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"