Greg has accurately described a large portion of my life.

Whenever talk turns lightly towards file exchange, especially "automated"
file exchange, I twitch, and my peripheral vision dims, my palms grow
sweaty, and my defences rise.

Usually, the friendly and co-operative parties you engage in the file
exchange duel turn nasty, and seem to deliberately obfuscate the process by
varying layouts, coding (ascii, bcd, ebcdic) and compression techniques,
names and extensions.

Then they turn on you accusingly, with mailstorms and snide remarks at
committee meetings.

Of course, one can blame the disparate operating systems, file systems, and
coding methods, fragile networks and timeouts, but it won't help.

If you engage in file exchange by any means other than creating the file on
the first machine yourself, physically carrying it to the second system, and
restoring it there, you will soon find yourself the victim of file transfer
gremlins.

Wouldn't it be nice if files were self describing, with file labels that
survived transfer protocols included, and every operating system HAD to
support these in order to be "accredited"? :)

Remember the pain of Ryder (Mover, Mover635/651), and how easy things became
with STD?

Neil Harvey

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *