Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Problems with minix stuff from BITNET
Message-ID: <1556@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 21 Oct 88 10:01:10 GMT
References: <4951@louie.udel.EDU>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 23

In article <4951@louie.udel.EDU> KYY%NIHCUDEC.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (M. DOBSON) writes:
>In a previous message I mentioned a minor problem I am having upgrading to
>1.3.  That is nothing compared to the major problems BITNET is causing for
>me. 

I can assure you, you're not alone.  Even I have great difficulty with 
BITNET, and I don't even use it.  My problem is that lots of people are
in your situation and they are constantly asking for help.

The only thing I can think of offhand, is maybe somebody, probably a BITNET
user, could write a program that combined the functions of compress and
uuencode in one simple, easy to use program.  If it were possible to
run a file through a simple filter and get a resulting file that was smaller
than the original and used only characters that BITNET accepts, this might
be acceptable, although there is very much the issue of how much 
nuisance USENET people are willing to put up with for the benefit of BITNET
people.  If this filter reduced text size, by first doing some sort of
compression, we could save some bandwidth, which saves everyone money.
I suspect that the character set BITNET allows is larger than that used by
uuencode, so a cleverly designed program should be able to avoid most of
the expansion produced by uuencode.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)