Earlier quoted context omitted.
> UNIX got battle-hardened during its college years Is that when it finally gave up making shar archives? For the unitiated: A shar is a "shell archive", or a shell script which (typically) makes heavy use of 'here documents' to do what tarballs do, only they're shell scripts so you have to execute them and then they can potentially execute arbitrary code unless you read through them very closely and actually underst…
I loved shars. It was a carefree time. Nothing to worry about.
telnet somehost someport | sh
(I remember an IRC client installer script hosted on sci.dixie.edu like that.)
Unfortunately we still have
curl http://somehost/somepath | bash
which is not very safe even if somehost is not malicious.
But it was kind of awesome when the Internet was friendly!