Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:3193 news.groups:6819 news.software.b:1846 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.groups,news.software.b Subject: Re: comp.datasets Call For Discussion Message-ID: <10875@s.ms.uky.edu> Date: 11 Jan 89 00:29:02 GMT References: <1249@fig.bbn.com> <1280@vsi1.UUCP> <151@cjsa.WA.COM> <394@ispi.UUCP> <4@netsys1.netsys.COM> <6201@hoptoad.uucp> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 44 IBM mainframes certainly count as 7-bit sites. I have one as a news neighbor ... psuvm.bitnet. For my other BITNET neighbor, a vax/vms cluster at U of L we *do* encode (for the technical minded, it's something like '(echo "#! bitbatch"; compress -c ${file} | btoa))'), and things work fine. But that IBM mainframe ... it's a whole 'nother ball of wax alltogether. In my personal knowledge there's 4 such machines on Usenet. There could easily be others, our mainframe people are considering it for instance. There could easily be others that I don't know about too. Beyond that considerations ... for a loooooong time the news standard has been to be as much like mail as possible. In fact I use that fact rather heavily, whenever I see something I like and need on my home computer I simply mail it there ... MMDF has a nice program to make this simple as well, I just do "s|resend david@davids" and off it goes. With binary gunk in news articles I'll no longer be able to do that. Yeah, I could write a shell script to wrap that up in a nice neat package ... Some of us have a dream of making a "WorldNet" .. a world-wide discussion system derived from the current Usenet. While it would be nice to have binary files shipped around in binary, there is a reality that we must pay attention to. There are *BACKWARD* operating systems in use out there people! And they don't all use ASCII, and even the ones that use ASCII don't all have a way of mixing straight text with binary gunk. If we want to have this WorldNet thing we've gotta pay attention to them folks. It's mighty unfriendly to snear down our noses at them and say they've got an ugly operating system! There's many ugly things about Unix as well and we got no more right to call their system ugly as they have to say ours is. -- <-- David Herron; an MMDF guy <-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <-- Now I know how Zonker felt when he graduated ... <-- Stop! Wait! I didn't mean to!