Among students and between students and me we have the luxury of a system (Share) that allows to exchange binary files (as you state), but this is different than the conversion to ascii method.

The Web is making Share less important, now that cut and paste can be used, but I still like using Share and plan to use it as long as it is available. Share was designed here at VCU, and I am told that any Unix programmer would be able to devise a similar program. How much, if anything, your readers will be interested in hearing about this is the question.

I will try to explain how it works.

1. Class accounts are set up so that the login IDs are uniform, e.g. c8066, c8066aa, c8066ab, c8066ab, etc.
2. The teacher gets the first account, the one without any letters at the end. All other accounts are setup one level below the teacher's account.
3. A Share Main Menu allows students to
   • turn in a copy of a file to the teacher
   • share a copy of a file to a folder that other students can access
   • grab a file that another student or the teacher has placed in one of the Share folders
4. Teachers can
   • share a file
   • grab a file
   • create folders (places to put certain files, e.g. Essay1 and Essay1.Comments)

The program copies files from one directory to another. For example, when a student c8066aa turns in a word processed file to the teacher, the program uses the Unix copy command to copy the file up on level into the the teacher's account.

The other ingredient that makes this system so handy is WordPerfect for Unix, which is available on the network.