Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!dcw
From: dcw@athena.mit.edu (David C. Whitney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Prob. in booting ProDos (ATINIT)
Message-ID: <10967@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 30 Apr 89 15:03:55 GMT
References: <8904300936.AA26944@crash.cts.com>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: dcw@athena.mit.edu (David C. Whitney)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 33

In article <8904300936.AA26944@crash.cts.com> pnet01!pnet51!pro-hysteria!wtaylor@nosc.mil writes:
>                                    also, what is BINSCII (or however it is
>spelled)

BinSCII is the new and improved method of sending programs across the
net. Since mailers have a hard time dealing with 8-bit bytes, binary
programs (ie, executables) can't be sent over the net directly. Hence
the need for some program to encode executables in some way so that
they turn entirely into plain ASCII. The first program (that I've
heard of) that did this was The Executive. It would take a binary file
as input and produce a file you could EXEC from Basic. EXECing would
re-create the original file. The next able program was Executioner,
which did pretty much the same thing, only it could encode files in
the more efficient 6-bit mode (6 bits of every byte were made into a
character instead of just four. This makes coded files much smaller).
Executioner had a few drawbacks though - there was an upper bound on
the size of the file you could encode (approximately 40k or so) and
the end user had to twiddle the text file before it was ready to be
EXECed in Basic. Also, its 6-bit encoding scheme used 'funny'
characters - they often wouldn't survive the translation when going to
EBCDIC machines (read: IBMs).

Therefore, I wrote BinSCII. It answers all of the drawbacks of
Executioner - file size is now limited to roughly 3 megabytes; the
6-bit encoding uses 'normal' characters; the end user doesn't need to
twiddle the file before processing; the parts of file can be processed
in any order. The only drawback right now is you need BinSCII in
order to decode files created by BinSCII.

Dave Whitney	A junior in Computer Science at MIT
dcw@athena.mit.edu  ...!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!dcw  dcw@goldilocks.mit.edu
I wrote Z-Link & BinSCII. Send me bug reports. I use a //GS. Send me Tech Info.
"This is MIT. Collect and 3rd party calls will not be accepted at this number."