From: dave@oldcolo.com (Dave Hughes)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Re: Info on Russia Internet c
Date: 11 Dec 92 20:55:44 GMT
Organization: Old Colorado City Communications (oldcolo.com - login "newuser")


 UUENCODE is a popular, public domain programs, form of data, so that
any file, particularly one in binary form (like a compressed file of
ascii, or graphics, or a compiled program) can be converted into
visible ASCII characters so that it can be sent in one or more pieces
through any e-mail system. One 'uuencodes' the source, then sends
the fileas e-mail, and the recipient either saves it to disk on 
large hosts (like unix or vax machines) and runs 'uudecode' which
puts it back into binary, or downloads it as an ascii file, and
runs an msdos or mac 'uudecode' to convert it.

We use it all the time - as a matter of fact we (Old Colo City Comm)
hired some Russian 'C' programmers in Moscow - communicating with
them only by e-mail - to help us develop 'Teledraw, a Naplps Troika'
program suite that lets anyone draw graphics, or type in any 
langauge font (like Cyrillic), uuencode it, send it as e-mail,
and at the other end, the Terminal program uudecodes it on the fly,
in ram, and the end user sees the ascii, the graphics, and the
Russian on their screen with ease. Thats just one possible use.

We are interested in the list of 'all' Russian BBSs too, because
Boardwatch Magazine is doing a cover story next month about
our, I guess unusual, joint arrangement between Colorado and
Moscow for developing software, and my trip over there last
month. Jack Rickard, editor, asked me for a list, and I got
him a list of the 126 BBS in Moscow (as of late October) but
not other cities - my last list is a year old.

So if you get a 'uuencoded' (you will know, the first lines
always start with ' begin 666 filename' and each line starts
with an upper case M) file (it may be more than one e-mail,
cause some uuencode software automatically breaks up a
big file into 64k or shorter ascii files, so interveneing
mailers don't choke on, say, a 500k file, in which case
each piece will have a number), you can e-mail to to
as 'dave@oldcolo.com', I will decode it and send it back
to you by e-mail. Or post it to the list - whatever people
want. And foward it to Jack so he can inform his 50,000
subscribers of all the BBSs in Russia, pretty much up
to date.

A neat use of those combined techniques happened last week.
I was asked to make a presnetation to Colorado Springs
Senior Networking Users Group (SNUG) - about 100 seniors
average age 70 - who run their own BBS, about my trip
to Moscow. So I asked Masha, in Moscow, to use our Beta
test software to write a little Russian winter (Xmas, sort
of) story, and illustrate it in NAPLPS, uuencode, it
and send it as email to them. I stood up and on the big
screen, the seniors were delighted to get her story,
and a winter Russian village scene, with 'Happy New
Year'in cyrillic. They responded while I stood there,
drawing a little color Xmas tree in Naplps, putting
all their first names on it, uuencoding it, and
sending it as an Electronic Greeting Card to Masha
and her family. 

Masha acknowledged it was received and viewed in fine
shape by her family - and little 7 year old Marina
was thrilled to get a graphic greeting card by email.

So next we are going to see if we can interest anyone
in taking some short Russian classic stories, 'do'
them in NAPLPS, with English press-a-key translations
of each paragraph, illustrate them nicely, and thus
begin a little true, international, (and royalty
paid) electronic publishing. 

Or in any other language font. All possible by e-mail,
in newsgroups, on BBSs, or comptuer conferencing systems.

Dave Hughes
dave@oldcolo.com
Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet