HPR4587: UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives

Hosted by Vance on 2026-03-03 00:00:00

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Dave Morriss says: Great reminder! I had forgotten shar

RE: hpr4587::2026-03-03 UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives by Vance
00:12:08 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
I'm way behind with listening to HPR episodes, so sorry for the late comment!

In the early 1990s the university I worked for (in Edinburgh) installed DECAthena, a commercial version of the MIT Athena Project. As a consequence I ended up with a DEC MIPS workstation on my desk running Ultrix.

We had a USENET feed by then and we would download stuff like pictures from various newsgroups, using a tool that I assume was shar. Files arrived as a series of posts with encoded contents, which we would reassemble in a newsreader and decode.

I had forgotten about this! Thanks for the reminder :-)

Printing coloured images was challenging in those days (for us anyway), and I recall we had a Thermal Wax printer to do it!

Dave

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Vance says: Color printing

RE: hpr4587::2026-03-03 UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives by Vance
00:12:08 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
Glad you enjoyed it, Dave! I did work at one place that had a color thermal transfer printer and got to use it a couple times.

They also had a film recorder, though I never used it myself. This would put a computer-generated color image onto photographic film. After being developed by a photo lab, the resulting film slides could then be shown using an ordinary slide projector. Very fancy stuff, until digital projectors became available.

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