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From: mcgurrin@MITRE.ARPA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Smartcom Upgrade
Message-ID: <8707291540.AA03327@mitre.arpa>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 11:40:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: mitre.8707291540.AA03327
Posted: Wed Jul 29 11:40:54 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 11:59:34 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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Organization: The MITRE Corp., Washington, D.C.
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Binary II is a format which someone (I wish I remembered his name off-hand to
give credit) developed for handling uploads and downloads of non-ASCII apple
files.  Various comm. software manufacturers had means for doing this, but 
they were non-standard.  For this reason, software uploaded to BBSs or value
added nets like compuserve loaded software in ASCII, and then you downloaded
it and Exec'd it to have a working program.  Unfortunately, IIgs programs 
are large, and ASCII versions take up a lot of space.  What was needed was a
protocol for file transfers that add the necessary file info (type of file and
file size), and handled a full 8 bits.  Binary II does this, and has been 
accepted as a standard by major commercial nets.  The formats are freely 
available (and posted here awhile back), and commercial, shareware, and 
public domain programs are available which will handle Binary II files.
The actual transmission uses XMODEM.  I hope that this is a reasonably
accurate summary of what it is.  A much better description by the original
author is floating around on various boards, this was all from memory.