In a message to Bob Lawrence 
rowan crowe  wrote:

 BL>   A better idea would be to use a fixed-length header padded with
 BL> spaces, so that both the packet header and the message header are
 BL> defined separately from the null termination, and could be made
 BL> failsafe.

 rc>     When FTS-1 was first defined, everything was sent
 rc> uncompressed, so packet size was an issue. These days it's
 rc> irrelevant when everything is compressed, so a fixed size
 rc> header would be a good idea, and practical to boot. 

A good idea, perhaps, provided any unused bytes are null-padded (or
zero-padded) to optimise compression (not just null-terminated.)

Instead of designing a new header, why not remove the header completely and
replace it with a set of kludge lines?

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