Subject: It's not mine
Author:
Posted on: 2016-02-14 04:26:00 UTC

ret13 was one of the oldest spoiler guards on the Internet. It was one of the two main spoiler guards on Usenet back in the 70s (the other was inserting a bunch of page break characters so the news reader wouldn't immediately show the spoiler). It has the nice property that encoding and decoding are the same operation (shift the alphabet halfway around) and that most Unix systems (including modern Linux, but I don't know about Mac OS X) had a "rot13" program to do it for you. (If they didn't, it was a one-line shell command).

- Tomash, nerding about about computer history

Reply Return to messages