Jeffrey Borinsky asked how the UK pound sign could be transmitted.

Mechanical Music Digest is edited for transmission using only the
"low-ascii" characters, that is, with values of 0 to 127 (hex 0 to 7F).
This is "ordinary e-mail" which, unfortunately, does not reliably
transmit the UK pound symbol and the special characters used in many
non-English languages.

Once in a while I overlook one of those high-ascii letters, and the
result is "bounce messages" from ISPs (both in America and abroad) who
complain, "Sorry, we cannot deliver 8-bit e-mail."  The MIME protocol
is gaining popularity in e-mail programs, and it provides several ways
of handling the special characters.  In addition, the MIME protocol
*specification* allows automatic encoding and decoding of e-mail
attachments using UUencode or BinHex or base64 algorithms.

Unfortunately, not all email programs have these features yet, and so
MMD is still edited for the lowest common denominator: 7-bit low-ascii.
I hope that someday our MMD subscribers will all be equipped with a
web browser, so that we can send the Digest as a HTML document, with
the potential for all the nice features and appearance of a good
web site.

Robbie Rhodes, MMD