abh0@GTE.COM (Andrew Hudson) (05/24/90)
GIF files can be really huge, upwards around 300,000 bytes for an SVGA with enough color. Files this size are prohibitive to post to news, and Since GIF's are valuable to only a small percentage of the internet community it makes more sense to archive them for access by ftp or by modem. People have already proposed a news group for the purpose of swapping image files and it was deep sixed :-<. So I would propose that we find 1) someone to digitize the pictures into GIF's, and 2) someone to archive them so the rest of us can access them. Any takers??? - Andrew Hudson abh0@gte.com
mpg@doe.carleton.ca (Mike Gagnon) (05/25/90)
In article <9146@bunny.GTE.COM> abh0@bunny.gte.com.UUCP (Andrew Hudson) writes: >Since GIF's are valuable to only >a small percentage of the internet community it makes more >sense to archive them for access by ftp or by modem. > >So I would propose that we find 1) someone to digitize the >pictures into GIF's, and 2) someone to archive them so the rest of >us can access them. > Hi! (First Post to this news group, so I'm a little nervous :)' Just thought I would let everyone know about this great graphics "Toolkit" I got from the network. Basically it's a bunch of programs for converting various image formats to and from portable formats. The package is called pbmplus. It can be found on an mit node. The node name is : expo.lcs.mit.edu The I.P. address is : 18.30.0.212 The directory is : contrib The file is : pbmplus.tar.Z You can get on the machine by anonymous ftp. Obviously this is a compressed tar file so you just uncompress, tar the files out, read the README and your all set to convert GIF to Sun Rast, or whatever. I've used the programs alot and have had alot of success. (Even going from GIF to PS). The version I have was released 22 Nov 89. It is no longer on the node I got it from, but is available on the node above. I don't know what version though. This might mean, those GIF files are valuable to alot more people. I thought if people are allowed to send games over the network (i.e. comp.sources.games) then why not send compressed tar files? Is it worth trying to arrange this? Failing that Andrew (I hope you don't mind me being informal) has a good idea about setting up a archive service with anonymous ftps'. All that is needed is a sys admin to allow you to use all his disc space and allow ftps! Oh well! If anyone knows of any site with scanned images that does allow anonymous ftp please let me know. Bye for now. Mike. P.s. If anyone has problems with getting the pbmplus files drop me a line, and I'll try to help.