mek%UMass.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA (08/13/86)
(PLEASE EXCUSE THE ALL-CAPS) I THINK THAT THE IDEA OF A SERVER GETTING MAIL COMMANDS AND SENDING FILES IS AN *EXCELLENT* IDEA. HOWEVER, SINCE NOT ALL NETWORK USERS ARE USING TOPS-20, I THINK THAT FILES SHOULD BE ABLE TO BE SENT IN OTHER FORMATS, SUCH AS .hex FILES. FOR EXAMPLE, THERE COULD BE COMMANDS LIKE: HEX NULU151.COM -WOULD SEND NULU151.COM IN HEX FORMAT, TO BE LOAD'ED OR HEXCOM'D. UUE NULU151.COM -WOULD SEND NULU151.COM IN A UUENCODED FORMAT. THERE COULD ALSO BE A DIR COMMAND, WHICH, BY ITSELF, WOULD SEND A LIST OF THE FILE AREAS AVAILABLE, AND WITH A PARAMETER OF A FILE AREA WOULD SEND A LIST OF THE FILES IN THAT AREA. I THINK THAT THIS WOULD BE AN EXCELLENT SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF ACCCESS TO THE SIMTEL20 ARCHIVES BY BITNET, JANET, CSNET, ETC. MATT KIMMEL, MEK%UMASS.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA
WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA (08/15/86)
Matt, It's not that anybody is running under TOPS-20. It's just that TOPS-20 is the operating system used by SIMTEL20. I feel that the basic requirement to have ARC and uudecode available on the target operating system is not too much to ask. ARC is already native to MSDOS users, and I believe there is a version of uudecode also available. On the CP/M side, there are several variants of at least the extract portion of ARC available, and I believe uudecode is available as well. The reason for choosing these two in combination is that the resulting message is pretty well guaranteed to be both shorter than the original and transmittable as an ordinary text mail file. It's not a parsing problem; it's simply an arbitrary policy decision, for now, at least. Let me see how things go and maybe there might be an option made available to allow retrieval of certain key bootstrap files only in HEX form. --Frank