In case you have not visited yet. Fly over to Nasa.gov
ftp nasa gov is the first internet gfx repository I've interacted with in the spawn days of internet setup and configuration in my country of SR / SA. At that time we used a 9600bps MNP5 faxmodem external of course from Telebit, donated by the OAS and delivered by Prof Saul Hahn of the University of Puerto Rico. The modem resided at the main PS\2 machine of Gerold van Dijk, director of the URC (Universitair Reken Centrum) and fractal mathematics specialist.
The Telebit was connected with a 16550AF UART, the ones from the computer were rated only for 2400BPS by IBM
Gerold gave lectures at the MIT to professors who needed to learn more about fractals. Gerold could quote complex fractal equations from memory and write them down so fast, you'd think he's a CAD plotter.
My interaction with NASA went as follows
Search via archie (archie ans net) fetch files via ftpmail (ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com)
Script was as follows
OPEN ftp nasa gov
cd /pub
ls -l
cd /pub/images
ls -l
cd /pub/images/star_systems
ls -l
after results of list structure came back I wrote another script
OPEN ftp nasa gov
binary
uuencode
cd /pub/images/star_systems
cd /pub/images/star_systems/proxima_centaury
get proxima-centaury_8192_3_of_4.jpg
ftpmail at decwrl sent back its results
OPEN ftp nasa gov
binary
uuencode
cd /pub/images/star_systems/proxima_centaury
get proxima-centaury_8192_3_of_4.jpg
size 165535 bytes
binary
uuencoding
mailing in 64K chunks 1 of 2
chunk 2 of 2
EOF
After that you had to
strip the headers and footers with vi (vim on my Amiga)
cat the mails with cat
one UUE file
uudecode file
rebuild proxima-centaury_8192_3_of_4.jpg
Open jpg viewer on Amiga
View image
This process took a week in the beginning, because our call fequency to upr2 clu net was once a week
#NASA #Space #explore #physics #chemistry #Lineair #Algebra #mathematics #Love #logic
