[TUHS] fmt(1): history, POSIX, -t, -c

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 12:10 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> It's nice to see a uuencode email attachment once again!
>
I was worried a MIME attachment might not get passed through the
automation, so I stayed with tried and true methods.

> Clem (who, by the way, is correct about the origin of fmt, it was part of
> Kurt Shoens' Mail program at Berkeley) has perfect timing. This coming
> Monday, 6/1/2020, is the 40th anniversary of the uuencode email attachment.
> (The date is based on the date in the uuencode man page in the 2.8BSD and
> 4.2BSD archives at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/ )
>
I could not have told you date, but I do remember when you sent it ber and
myself, specifically.

There has been some amusing coverage of the "25th anniversary of the email
attachment", commemorating Nat Borenstien's creation of MIME in 1992.
And his scheme does not work on IBM Mainframes or 6-bit machine as is (Nat
required an 8 bit path).  Your scheme passed through all known systems at
the time.

> Any thoughts on a proper commemoration of the 40th anniversary?
>
Can't say I know the proper way to do that, other than to say thank you and
acknowledge the hack as a darned creative solution to an issue a lot of us
had.

Clem
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