ed(1) is the right tool (V)
     ===========================

This is a relatively quick one. I recently used ed(1) to write my entry
to the ROOPHLOCH 2020 contest [1], and I did so from the ed(1) version
available in FUZIX [2], which is somehow close to the original ed(1)
available in early Research Unix systems. No need to say that ed(1) did
its job as expected (obviously, an editor does not know anything about
the amount of nonsense you put in a file, so I refer here to the
mechanics of editing, not the content of the post :P). 

After I finished my post, I piped it through fold(1) to make sure that
all the lines were at most 68 chars long. I went for fold(1) because
that is the only formatter I had on FUZIX (and I actually had to port it
myself to FUZIX from sbase [3], because FUZIX does not have fold(1)
yet). And then I remembered that someting like: 

  $ fold -w 68 -s file.txt

would indeed make sure that none of the lines is wider than 68 chars,
also avoiding to break words (-s), but it would *not* join lines
belonging to the same paragraph, as for instance fmt(1) or par(1) would
do. This means that my paragraphs were all messed up, with lots of
unwanted newlines where the original newlines stood. 

The solution? Just join all the lines of a paragraph in a single line!
The direct way of doing that is to use the ed(1) command "j" (yes, "j"
is for join), which will join the current line and the next one, and
leave the current address at the resulting line. I did this by repeating
the "j" command as many times as needed in order to have each paragraph
in a single line (there is indeed a much smarter way of doing that, but
we need some more advanced ed-fu). Then saved the file, gave it to fold,
and then cat(1) it to a serial port connected to my laptop, ready to be
sent over the Internet.

 -+-+-+-

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/roophloch/2020

[2] http://www.fuzix.org

[3] http://git.suckless.org/sbase/