Why no Apple II AOL FTP site?

["Charles T. Turley" <cturley@wco.com>]

I've been trying to research a method to provide the Apple II AOL
archives via their other public access AOL ftp site, so that
everybody using an Apple II, with FTP abilities could gainaccess 
to the archives.  The Apple II AOL archives total around 251 MB - 
complete.

A few email replies to me from Bob - (FTPAdmin@aol.com) outlined the
problems that make such a thing impossible.  The following are his
replies.

"As much as I'd love to move the Apple2 files from (expensive)
Stratus disk to (inexpensive) Unix disk, its not practical.

Software archives here exist in "blobs" that are 10s of MBs big, with
header files containing the description and pointers into the "blobs"
to start getting the data.  And the data is in 127 byte, RLL-encoded
(more or less) chunks for direct use by the AOL download protocol.

At this time, I do not know of any utility that would let me reduce a
software library to the file and descriptive parts for FTP-style
postings".

"The individual files that make up the Apple2 libraries are scattered
throughout a number of huge encoded archives in the AOL software
libraries.   The only way I would have to break them out would be to
download them one at a time.

Just because the files are orgainized into a (logical) library on the
AOL service doesn't imply they're stored in physical congruity"...


Sorry to be the messenger of the bad news but, those are the hard
facts. So, it seems to me - the Apple II public users have three
choices to access the Apple II AOL archives.

(A) Get an Acct. on AOL using either a Mac or PC
    and access them.
     
(B) Buy a CD with the Apple II AOL archives on it.

(C) Somebody can offer to provide the FTP site with 
    the storage space (around 251 MB) and I'll be
    happy to download everything and then upload it
    all to such a public access Apple II FTP site.
    
    Does anybody care to make such an FTP site and
    space available?
    
    Cheers,
    Tom