Remember comp.sources.hp48?

[Joe Horn]

Some of y'all might be old enough to remember that there was a USENET newsgroup in the early 1990's called comp.sources.hp48, moderated by Chris Spell. Many cool programs were posted to it, but the momentum died out and the final programs appeared in November 1993.

The earliest postings used uuencode to post their programs. Unfortunately these uuencoded blocks seem to have gotten deleted at some point in time, forever losing those programs.

Fortunately, Chris Spell soon asked that all programs be posted after encoding them with a program called "Ship" instead of (or in addition to) uuencode. The postings contain blocks of random-looking text (similar to uuencoding) which look like this:

Code:

$
ship qed.zip
s:V9"5{{{{<o.o7-qp4M62'7{JuR@{(Ke{{Ma7TA6d:JD7StDgx{;2&=?3ZM<*K->"&QZ#s{{Yr
Iu,gXKvc+K)l,;3:nN578Q5ZBtOb;3D0ez'k+-AL;io_+30$1)MDx9B2pFFW$Y(39EE)&GED&PS

[huge block of noise snipped here]

ugkm/3'hPL(Ke{{{{{{{"'*{{#diUJo#{{{5OAs/SE+m:-28*'8b{{{"R(buQLYz<4KJxmB:(bu
w8ln${{{{{{{{{{LQk,Jtq$&{aeb7A&XefE-n/pB4_Va"'{{{{'Eww{uj&{{z(E*{<qk;e0iC7
$
end

The HP 48 programs thus encoded can be "reconstituted from concentrate" by running Ship on these text blocks (similar to the way uudecode works). Has anybody made any attempt to retrieve and un-ship these programs and upload them to hpcalc.org? Some of them are already there, but many are not. Putting them there would be great, before comp.sources.hp48 evaporates altogether and these programs are lost forever.