🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1galsqINNr88@gap.caltech.edu> jack@ccsf.caltech.edu (Jack Stewart) writes:
>As I understand, the main reason for MIME to use base64 encoding (as
>opposed to uuencode, 8bit transparent, XDR, or BER ) was that they
>needed an encoded scheme that would remain uncorrupted accross all
>platforms and architectures and existing mailers.  Apparently this is
>a real problem with IBM VM/CMS machines.  base64 encoding was the only
>thing that would survive these machines.  Hopefully these machines
>will go away some day and then we can use a more reasonable encoding
>mechanism.

Yes, but this is a minor problem compared to the presence of machines
which use the 7-bit American ASCII code, where the top bit is a parity
bit.  EBCDIC, as used by VM/CMS (and MVS and DOS), is an 8-bit code.
Neither uuencode nor base64 are 'reasonable', since they both 'waste'
bandwidth, but the reason they exist is fundamentally because ASCII
is a 7-bit code.

By the way, there are lots of other machines which have even _fewer_
printable characters than VM/CMS.