I can't speak to the original question since I was not around at the time, but uuencode is really cool. When I first saw it, probably in connexion with a BBS of some kind, I immediately went and wrote my own 6.5 bit encoder based on some number corresponding to the number of printable characters available which when squared gave a 13 bit number. Played around with this and gave it to a friend for fun to exchange messages in. But the original is obviously much more in use :)

Nick

On Mar 19, 2017 1:41 PM, "Dave Horsfall" <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

On Sat, 18 Mar 2017, Mary Ann Horton wrote:

> 1. Originally, our files were all plain text and we just included them in
> the email message body. The ~r command in Kurt Shoen's Mail program was
> typical. There was no name for this, we were just emailing files.

1.5 They started to include in-line shell scripts, then we piped them
into the "unshar" utility, which did basic security checks.

--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."