Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/40

 Step one was to begin tackling TPS, the ITU wonder program developed years ago. I brought the tapes over to Mike Schwartz, a professor at the University of Colorado and my partner on the Sun research grant.

The ITU had documented the format we could expect the tapes to be in. Each file had a header written in the EBCDIC character set. The file itself used a character set seemingly invented by the ITU, known by the bizarre name of Zentec. The only problem was that the header format wasn't EBCDIC and the structure the ITU had told us would be on the tape wasn't present.

Using Captain Crunch Decoder Rings, we finally figured out a collating table for the mystery header character set and managed to hack the files off the tape. There were large amounts of data at the beginning and end of files which seemed useless and was simply deleted. We crossed our fingers that the deleted information would not be needed later and indeed, it wasn't.

Next, we had to tackle TPS. This text formatting language was as complicated as any one could imagine. Developed without the desire for clarity and simplicity I had come to expect from the UNIX operating system and its tools, I was lost with the Byzantine, undocumented TPS.

The solution was to take several physical volumes of the Blue Book and compare the text to hexadecimal dumps of the files. I then went to the Trident Café and spent a week drinking coffee trying to make sense of the data I had, flipping between the four files that might be used on any given page of text trying to map events in the one-dimensional HexWorld to two-dimensional events in the paper output.

Inbetween trips to the coffee house, I was trying to take care of diagrams and the PC files. Diagrams were simple: I sat down every morning for a few hours and scanned in diagrams. The diagrams were saved as TIFF and EPS files, then uploaded to our Sun server.

The PC files were all unloaded onto a VAX, then moved over to the Sun, then downloaded at 9,600 bps to my home network. There, the files were loaded into Word for Windows, and then exported as Rich Text Format, the Microsoft proprietary standard for open document interchange. The RTF files were then converted to Word