One day, while studying old code, I found out that it’s possible to encode Windows Portable Executable files as a UNIX Sixth Edition shell script, due to the fact that the Thompson Shell didn’t use a shebang line. - αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε - HN

Back when all you had was minicom dialing a BBS, there was a chicken and egg problem where you needed uudecode to decode any executable you downloaded. If you did not have uudecode you were stuck. If you are unfamiliar, unencoding a file allows you to send binary data through text transmission.

Then a clever version of a DOS .COM file was posted which implemented uudecode, but it only used x86 instructions that were also ASCII characters. You could copy/paste between the –cut here– lines into a file, save it as uudecode.com, and then get your other binaries like pkzip. - HN

see also

• redbean / HN - a webserver in a zip executable that runs on six operating systems.