Future of cctalk/cctech - text encoding

[Peter Coghlan]

Someone whose name might be Marc might have written:
>>>> Peter Coghlan wrote:
>>>> Does anyone use ASCII anymore?
>>> 
>>> I read and write my email with Emacs running in a terminal emulator.
>>> I rarely need anything beoynd codepoint 126.
>> 
>> I vote we move the list to an Exchange server behind a SSL VPN and mandate
>> the use of Outlook, then force all messages to be in quoted-printable
>> encoding. This way nobody “wins” and everyone is equally miserable.
>> It’s only fair.
>

C'mon, quoted-printable is usually fairly readable.  How about base-64?
Or if this is regarded as too modern or too universal, how about uuencoding?

>
> +1 on the Exchange server. You might even be able to have more than 2 people
> connected to it at the same time without crashing, if you put enough admins
> on the problem.
>

You can't use an Exchange server.  I believe Exchange servers silently
discard messages whose message-id it has previously seen.  This would solve
(actually hide) the duplicated messages problem and we can't have that!

> 
> But I would strongly suggest that we limit it to using characters from the
> Baudot set. If not they don’t print right on my 1930 Teletype.
> 
> Also Darwin recently wrote a paper about us, and revoked his theory of
> evolution. 
> 
> Unlike the God-awfull Yahoo Groups, Groups.io works OK for the other lists
> I follow. Meaning it’s functional and tolerable, and only moderately
> infuriating. But it is certainly not as clean and efficient as this list
> by a good margin. It would be good if we could preserve this.
> 
> Maybe evolve to the use of pictures or attachments, just to prove Darwin
> wrong? Limited to ASCII art only pictures, of course.
>

Hang on, what about those who prefer their art in upper case EBCDIC only?

Regards,
Peter Coghlan

> 
> Marc