Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 29K archsim 1/7
Message-ID: <17248@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 89 16:58:54 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 17

<3816@uklirb.UUCP> kirchner@uklirb.UUCP (Reinhard Kirchner) :
>From article <24181@amdcad.AMD.COM>, by phil@diablo.amd.com:
>> xbtoa Begin
>> 9j/S<'EA::+954Ks8RofJ,h<Gz*WQ0?!<<0$!!!6(!!"SN!!"\Q!!!o;!!3-#zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
>BUT
>what kind of File is this ?

btoa and atob are a pair of programs similar to uuencode/uudecode.  They
stand for Binary-TO-Ascii and Ascii-TO-Binary.  I think they are part of
the 'tar' package or maybe the 'cpio' package, both of which are used on
Unix systems to do things similar to what zoo or arc do.

btoa/atob uses more characters than uuencode does, so the resulting file
isn't quite as big.  4 to 5 expansion versus 3 to 4, I believe.  I've
seen source code for pcs.  A Unix system may have man pages that
describe the algorithm in enough detail to implement it -- given the
translation table, it should be a minor hack to uudecode source...?