Date:  Fri, 8 Sep 1995 13:37:47 -0700

From:  David Harnick-Shapiro <david[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]BUCKAROO.ICS.UCI.EDU>

Subject: Re: ADS-ANS deadline September 1



On Thu, 31 Aug 1995 14:23, Betty Phillips writes:



> * This message contains the file 'PHILLIPS.ADS', which has been

> * uuencoded. If you are using Pegasus Mail, then you can use

> * the browser's eXtract function to lift the original contents

> * out to a file, otherwise you will have to extract the message

> * and uudecode it manually.



and all hell breaks loose. Some good things did come out of this

affair -- an increase in the number of humanists who appreciate the

difficulties in file exchange, for example. And I'll bet there's

quite a few who will think twice before assuming, "I use <insert

favourite word processor>, so *everyone* must use it"; they may

even disabuse a few colleagues.



So why am I dragging this up again? I *did* bother to try to find

out what the original post was, and thought I'd share with those more

noted for their morbid curiousity than for their reason.



Here we go: message comes in as a digest; program number one is my

mail reader. Burst the message out of the digest: that's program

number two. Three: an editor to remove the mail headers and other

non-uuencoded stuff (this step was probably not actually necessary).

Four: uudecode. This is the first step where an error is reported;

the file was probably not uuencoded properly, or the uuencoded version

may have been clobbered, but let's press on regardless. Five and six:

the Unix "file" and "less" commands, to try to figure out what kind of

file was created; decide it's not a Unix or text file (which was

unlikely, anyway), so I'll try a Mac. Seven: 'Fetch', to copy the file

from Unix to a Macintosh. Eight: MS Word for Mac. Word, when coerced

into opening the file, announced that it was converting a WordPerfect 5.1

file, but was unable to finish.



So: eight programs, two platforms, several machines and several networks

later, I have: an unreadable portion of a WordPerfect file. I love

the way computers empower me.



:-)



--------

   David Harnick-Shapiro   Information and Computer Science

     david[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ics.uci.edu   University of California, Irvine