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Re: e-mail formating



At 02:12 AM 3/29/97, Brad Shue wrote:
On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, James Mclean wrote:
... BinHex is just a way to convert binary files to ASCII so that
they can be sent through e-mail.
....
James,
As far as I can tell, binhex is not compression. It is simply a
leftover from the bitnet era when mailers could not handle binary files as
attachments....

J Bradford Shue

Long long ago, the ASCII coding of a character string ( a protocol
originally specifying 7 bits) could be obstructive when sending a file via
modem,
because modems allocated a subset of the ASCII codes to transmission control
in a similar manner to teleprinter practice.

The remedy was to recode ascii data in six bits, which avoided the control
codes altogether. Moving a character string from a seven bit code to a six
bit code entails some loss of packing efficiency.

So, I agree, binhex is not compression.

Regards
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK