Date   : Thu, 14 Aug 1986 01:46:00 MDT
From   : WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA
Subject: MAIL ACCESS TO SIMTEL20 ARCHIVES

Matt,

It's not that anybody is running under TOPS-20.  It's just that
TOPS-20 is the operating system used by SIMTEL20.  I feel that the
basic requirement to have ARC and uudecode available on the target
operating system is not too much to ask.  ARC is already native to
MSDOS users, and I believe there is a version of uudecode also
available.  On the CP/M side, there are several variants of at least
the extract portion of ARC available, and I believe uudecode is
available as well.

The reason for choosing these two in combination is that the resulting
message is pretty well guaranteed to be both shorter than the original
and transmittable as an ordinary text mail file.  It's not a parsing
problem; it's simply an arbitrary policy decision, for now, at least.
Let me see how things go and maybe there might be an option made
available to allow retrieval of certain key bootstrap files only in
HEX form.
--Frank