>>>>> John Levine <
jo...@iecc.com> writes:
[Cross-posting to news:comp.mail.uucp and dropping
news:comp.misc from Followup-To:, for obvious reasons.]
>> Also, is the documentation for the "historic" UUCP packages (Version
>> 7 Unix' one? HDB?) available somewhere on the Web? I guess it could
>> shed some light on the UUE origins. (As, as per the Wikipedia
>> article, UUE was designed to allow for binary transfer over UUCP
>> links.)
> Actually, uucp could transfer arbitrary binary files just fine, and
> it was quite common to transfer compressed tarballs of news or mail.
Well, it wasn't all that long ago that I ran a couple of UUCP
links myself. And although virtually the only implementation
I'm familiar with is Taylor UUCP, I guess that they all indeed
allowed for binary transfer.
> What uuencode let you do was to send a binary file disguised as a
> mail message, which let you send it via multi-hop uucp routes to
> people on hosts to which you didn't have a direct connection.
Which matches the use of Base64 and quoted-printable encodings
to work-around the non-guaranteed 8-bit-cleanness of SMTP links.
As it seems, there's indeed some confusion between "UUCP" and
"UUCP-based mail service," much like the one between, say,
"Base64" (or "quoted-printable") and "MIME," or, occasionally,
between "Internet" and "World Wide Web..."
> My recollection is that it showed up pretty soon after we started
> using uucp, which would have been in about 1979.
ACK, thanks!
Also in line with that is that, as Richard Kettlewell has just
pointed out, 4BSD had uuencode.c [1], timestamped "October,
1980." (And unless there be objections, I'm going to add a
pointer to it on the Wikipedia article.)
I still wonder if there's some sort of changelog back from these
days to state "BSD version X.Y. Added uuencode." Or something
like that.
[1]
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD/usr/src/cmd/uuencode.c