Subject: Re: 7 bits forever!

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 10:40:43 -0500

Valdis Kletnieks wrote:

>On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 00:30:37 GMT, "D. J. Bernstein" said:
>
>> Boy, I'm glad that, when you faced the much smaller problem of 
non-ASCII
>> subject lines back in 1991, you and your buddies decided to ``maximize
>> the rate'' of deployment by inventing your own encoding mechanisms,
>> rather than giving in to the demands of 8-bit transparency. Oh, sure, 
we

>you could *NOT* trust that all the systems
>between here and there were 8-bit-clean (in fact, an 8-bit-clean system
>was a rarity)

In fact, in 1991, you couldn't even rely on them being 7-bit-clean.  I 
remember exchanging mail with someone whose mail server kept changing ^ to 
? for all messages he sent or received.  (It came up because we were 
talking about Pascal.  I was young, OK? :-) We eventually figured out 
that, although he had an Internet-style address, his mail gateway was 
connected via BITNET, which used EBCDIC.  That's where base64 came from: 
it had to use characters that would be legal in all known systems.

/=================================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer              |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.         |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.         |
|=================================================================|
|"And bring the search warrant." "You mean the sledgehammer, sir?"|
|"Yes."                                                           |
\=================================================================/