Similar Formats
In 1987, Michael Bednarek from The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne developed a script for a similar purpose in the DIGITAL Command Language for the VMS operating system under the name "VMS_Shar version 2".
The main purpose of this script was to allow the distribution of formatted program code through e-mail and Usenet newsgroups because:
- Mail transfer agents and NNTP server software only allowed printable ASCII characters (32–126);
- They tended to strip leading and trailing blanks and TAB characters;
- And they usually broke lines longer than 80 characters. VMS_SHAR protected leading blanks, and it split long files into parts of less than 16,000 bytes.
Version 4 introduced the protection of trailing blanks using the TPU text editor editor which then became the main engine of the script. Version 5 protected control characters like TAB, ESC, BEL. In 1988, beginning with version 6, the script was then extended by James A. Gray from Xerox. Starting with version 7, Andy Harper from King's College London continued the development;. The current version (as of 2008) is 8.5 (1994)
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