don at nz.net

Back in the dark days of dial-up and analogue leased lines, I ran across a problem.

I had a file I needed to email to my home box, and MIME wasn’t a thing yet, so I used “uuencode” (a predecessor to base64, converting binary data into text that could be contained in 7-bit printable ASCII characters) to make it suitable for email transmission it, and sent it to my home email address. And as the email was making its way to my home box, my modem reset.

The modem reconnected and it tried again. It reset again. And again. Commence debugging …

to cut a long story short, I discovered that the encoded text contained a line with the string “+++”, followed by the string “AT”, and later a “Z”.

For those fortunate enough never too had to deal with these horrid things…

I presented a talk at this year’s NZNOG in Christchurch, titled “Life in a ’90s ISP: Internet Services at Victoria University of Wellington / NetLink, 1992-1997”.

For those wanting another look at the slides (or the pictures), they are here: https://don.nz.net/downloads/nznog-2026.pdf

The actual talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qzUslAh9M8&t=4h52m20s