Importing binary files without removable storage nor non-bundled software (was: TKermitFTP

[Tom Jennings]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

>> Well, my guess would be that it has no way to determine the EOF coming
>> over the line, as it can't just "check the file length", unless there's
>> a ^Z there to indicate it.  Thus, ASCII mode is needed.
>
> And the programmers were not smart enough to figure a way around this
> because...why?

Because it is not theoretically possible, given the limitations of
IBM feces serial ports and the usual serial environment. There's
simply no way to get the information (file size, or EOF) from one
system to the other and preserve the trivial unstructured
character stream.

That's what protocols like XMODEM etc do; create an information
structure with which to send meta data.