Re: Ideas that didn't come off

Scout wrote:
Will you share the gory details with us?

I used to be active in QLink which was an online service for Commodore users
(it would eventually morph into AOL).

At the time, they didn't offer attachments to email.
I came up with the idea of converting binary files to text mode and
splitting them into manageable chunks that could be included as email
content. Once the messages had been received, the same program could be used
at the other end to reassemble the binary file. I spent a lot of time
writing it in 6502 assembler complete with my own compression algorithm.

QLink management was close to accepting "HexMail" as an officially supported
feature but backed out at the last minute out of fear it might promote
piracy.

I thought I'd really come up with something. Later someone asked me if I'd
heard of MIME encoding and other ideas like that. Apparantly, I had
re-invented the wheel. <g>

I could add a hundred other stories. Basically, ideas are a dime a dozen.
Implementing them is the hard part. And in the example above, even if it had
been implemented, it was still a case of poor research (ok, no research) on
my part. <g>

--
Jim Rowell


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