If a binary file is transmitted via a communications link which is not eight-bit clean, it will be corrupted. To combat this, encodings have been devised which use only ASCII characters. The most popular of these have been UUCP and MIME base64 encoding. There are some communication links which are not even "seven-bit clean" due to their use of non-ASCII character sets internally; they cause problems even for UUCP-encoded data. This is the reason for the introduction of base64 encoding, which has largely replaced UUCP in practice.
By the mid-1990s, practically all computer and communication systems implementations were updated to be 8-bit clean, as the systems became widely used outside the US and UK. However, for reasons of legacy compatibility 8-bit cleanliness concerns are still an issue in for example the internet e-mail protocol SMTP.
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This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.