When I first started making web pages. My first <HTML> (back then we caps our tags because we were gangsta). I had just installed Netscape Navigator and was writing my pages (I don’t think we called it a site back then, the whole lot was a website), I wanted to share some punk rock music I was into as my website was a giant list of links to other bands etc etc. Me, being on Mac OS 7, just went with what I had been using, sit.hqx. I had no idea this wasn’t “standard”, no idea other folks couldn’t stuffit-expander their way to easy file sharing. Apache web server had no problem sending the mime-type. Stuffit will forever be baked in my heart as my first archive “wait you mean you can’t open that?” experience on the internet. Mind you this was pre-winrar. Pre-7z. Pre-AOL. Pre-Flatscreens. Pre-cellphones. Fuck I’m old.
Speaking of Mac software from the previous century, today I learned that the web browsers iCab and OmniWeb are still around.
OmniWeb first came out in 1995 for NextSTEP and was later released for Mac OS X. I believe it was The Omni Group's main app pre-OmniGraffle. The last stable release was in 2012, but the unstable version is still getting occasional updates.[^1]
iCab was first released in 1999 for Mac OS 7/8 as shareware. Looks like it's still getting a few updates per year, too.[^2]
I'm pretty sure both AOL and cellular phones pre-date StuffIt. Not that WinRAR or 7zip would have helped as I don't believe either of them ever supported SIT archives.
The primary GPU engineer on Asahi Linux (distro for Apple Silicon) was 17 when she first made news. She's still on the task and a related headline about the performance of the GPU driver was on the front page of HN earlier this week or last week.
Some people just exceed our expectations. I can't achieve at that level, but I'm happy to cheer for those who can.
Nerding out on computers is something that can be done from a very early age. You don’t get a lot of law or medicine child prodigies, but math and compsci is very conducive to an early start, particularly for the neuro-atypical. You can enrol in a computer science degree at age 18 and find that the people at the top of your class already have ten years experience.
This is probably due to how open the industry is in the legal sense on one hand, and to the "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" mentality on the other.
I started coding when I was a kid. I didn't have to seek permission from anyone, my parents didn't even know. I didn't have to obtain a license. There was no surprised clerk wondering what that kid is doing on their website, like there would have been in a physical establishment I'd need to visit for any other hobby. There was an over-13 restriction on most websites in theory (seriously, fuck COPPA), but we all knew that we should never give out our real date of birth on the internet to avoid trouble. The only places that were unavailable to me were those requiring a credit card, so a VPS was out of the question, but you could do just fine if all you had was free resources.
Mathematics is an oddball since you could study it purely with books, pencils, and paper. Programming does have an entry fee to practice, but computers became very cheap very fast in the early 1980's. By the early 1990's you could get somebody else's castoff hardware for free. By the early 2000's you could get practically any type of development tool you wanted for free. There are also plenty of stories of enthusiatic and creative people finding ways to access computers for as long as time sharing systems existed. Even if you were relatively isolated geographically and had to spend your own money on a computer, the only real cost was the initial outlay and that expense could keep someone occupied for years. (For the most part, people didn't subscribe to software or online services back then.)
Social factors also enter the picture. A kid exploring chemical reactions or disecting small animals is going to be looked upon very differently from one spending half of their waking hours programming computers. For the most part, there is nothing illegal with any of those activities. It is just that the first two usually brought to mind potentially immorall or potentially illegal activities, while the latter was viewed as harmless at worse.
props to Raymond Lau for certain, but few can match Waldemar Horwat from this chair !
#--
TMON was written by Waldemar Horwat. It was almost always used with an optional add-on, called a User Area, that was written by Darin Adler. Both of them were just kids at the time they worked on TMON. Darin Adler was a college student, and Waldemar Horwat had not yet finished high school. According to Darin Adler’s account, Horwat wrote the entire thing (in assembly language), before ever trying to assemble it.
TMON is absolutely hands down the most joyful tool I’ve ever used. Debugging classic mac INITs, trap patches, heaps. I’m sure a mail machine would’ve felt similar (if not more alive) but being able to poke at a running system - from within the system - was amazing. We do it differently now, but for a brief period of time, we were gods.
Well one could argue a high school education from Stuyvesant High School is probably on par with the 75-percentile college in the US. It has produced many outstanding alums.
Yeah. I knew something was fishy when I clicked the StuffIt Wikipedia link and from there the link to the Stuy high school page was already a visited link!
The Unarchiver (available on the Mac App Store) is the Jack-of-All-Trades decompressor of choice for me on my Mac these days, and can actually handle quite a few versions of StuffIt archives.
> The source code of Keka 1.0 will not be public due some legal issues. Legal support is needed, if you can help the project, please get in contact on info@keka.io or the Project page on the official Keka website. Any help is welcome.
> "_SOURCE_" = "The source code of Keka 1.0 will not be public due some legal issues. Legal support is needed, if you can help the project, please get in contact on info@keka.io or the Project page on the official Keka website. Any help is welcome.";
My problem with Unarchiver, Keka, and most other "decompression apps" available on MacOS is that none of them offer any kind of browsing functionality or the ability to select specific files to extract from your archive. They seem to focus on only extracting everything, and sometimes charge $4.99 for that limited functionality (looking at you Keka).
For that reason, these days I tend to stick with 7-Zip running through CrossOver for my archiving needs.
Mac classic resource forks, while most user friendly, were maximally power user opaque. OS X resource forks implemented as files create underlying file system messiness on non macs across network file systems but at least solved the migration and backup problem in a UNIX-like way. A slight tradeoff that's a win for interoperability.
Windows NTFS ADS, allowing any file to contain any number of other files hidden to the user was a terrible idea that never should've happened. It still works in Windows 11 and it's a giant security vulnerability that marches on because of the tyranny of "compatibility".
File metadata should be possible but it should be limited to essential OS housekeeping activities but definitely not by applications.
Faithful backup, restoration, migration, and archival needs keen attention to the preservation of platform-specific filesystem metadata and maintaining the faithful integrity of such.
Abour 30 years ago, I remember using Disk Doubler / Auto Doubler to wring more out of an 80 Mb hard drive on a IIsi... having it work in the background seemed sort of miraculous.
Too bad they don’t tell the Stuffit history. How Raymond Lau (?) started it in the 80s and how it grew into the business it is now. (Is it a buneisnss I have no idea.)
Used StuffIt all the time in the classic Mac until Compact Pro came along. Compression wars!
In the late 90s my Dutch consultancy company worked for McGraw Hill. As a non-native English speaker, I didn’t think much of the name Stuffit until I told a graphics designer at McGraw Hill to use Stuffit to handle a bunch of files I sent her. She looked at me both appalled and curious, likely thinking that this weird European said something offensive. I apologized profusely and explained that it was nothing more than a tool to make files smaller. I still think she thought I pulled her leg.
Blast from the past! Downloading new packs from iconfactory and seeing that lavender clamp just hit different from the windows-yellow zip archives. Never thought about it until now but maybe it was just the native colorscheme?
Don't know if it handles the forks but I've used The Unarchiver on Windows for sit.hqx, should be available on Linux at least through https://theunarchiver.com/command-line
I might be wrong but I remember that I couldn't extract some really old Stuffit archives using the current versions, but an old copy of 'stuffit520.611linux-i386' I tracked down could.
Does anyone know if that makes sense? Did the format ever change?
Yes it did. "Sit" is the classic format, and "Sitx" is the modern format.
From Wikipedia:
"[Stuffit X] was designed to be extendable, support more compression methods, support long file names, and support Unix and Windows file attributes. StuffIt X improves over the original StuffIt format and its descendants by adding multiple compression algorithms such as PPM, and BWT to LZW-type compression. It also added a "block mode" option, error correcting "redundancy" options to protect against data loss, and several encryption options. In January 2005, JPEG compression was added as a StuffIt X compression option"
Unlike the original Stuffit format, Stuffit X never saw any significant use, since Mac OS X had switched to Zip as its default archive format.
I'm surprised reading this thread how many people download 3rd party tools for compression. 15+ years developing on macs and I've never needed to add anything special (beyond tar/gz). Guess I don't (de)compress enough to notice?
It was essential back in the Mac OS 9 / early Mac OS X days. The .sit archive was one of the only things that reliably handled the resource fork in the HFS file system, and pretty much all the freeware I downloaded back then was in .sit files.
This was like... 1999 to 2005ish, so definitely feeling my "elder millennial" status.
Yeah, 15 years ago was still well into the OS X days (heck, it was into the iOS days). Resource forks were long gone as a concern by then, and as such stuffit didn't really bring anything unique to the table, an in some ways was worse since no other *nix user was likely to even have it.
You’re not old enough (or came late to the Mac). Those of us who used it were on Macs 20 - 30 years ago. Gen X Mac users will be the biggest StuffIt (or Compact Pro) cohort.
Stuffit was a classic Mac OS tool, used in the original versions of the operating system.
Mac OS X was released in 2001. The "Classic" environment was removed with the transition to x86 in 2006
Fifteen years ago was 2009. You never had the need because you came to the platform long after the transitions that made Stuffit--an absolute essential in the late eighties through the early 2000s--not relevant.
This is my first time hearing about it, despite daily driving MacBooks for 10 years. Does it have any advantages over other compression software? I've been using Keka for a long time and it has yet to disappoint me.
Back in 2000, it was what everything on the Mac was compressed in, because it understood the Mac’s uniquely complex executable file format and was a much more reliable way to transfer executables than compressors designed on simpler file systems.
Then in 2001 OSX came out, with a new executable file format of “a specially named and structured directory in a boring UNIX file system”, and Stuffit’s reason for existing began to vanish. I’m honestly very surprised someone is still updating it now.
It wasn't limited to executable files. All files were split into data and resource forks. As a bare minimum, the resource fork would define the file type. Without it, the Finder couldn't figure out which program to open the file in. A lot of software couldn't even open its own documents without the resource fork, sometimes because it couldn't figure out the file type and sometimes because it used the resource fork for its own purpose (so the document would be corrupted).
Unlike many people, I think the resource fork was a good idea. It structured files in a consistent way, and they were easy to examine if you had the right tools. The shortcoming is that there was not standard way (or maybe too many standard ways) to transfer files between systems intact. There was too much risk of important data being lost because the system you were transferring the data to (or a system you were transferring data through, or the software you were using was configured to ignore the resource fork) didn't recognize the resource fork or its encoding.
(It is also worth noting that a lot of file formats tend use something similar to resource forks these days. Resource forks are a bit like using zip files as a wrapper in, say, ODT and ePub files.)
Apple pushed compressed disk images (.dmg) early on as the preferred way to distribute software on Mac OS X, so StuffIt wasn't necessary.
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) introduced native .zip support, and that seems to have largely taken over these days. I wonder how much of that is due to it being easier for CI systems to produce .zip archives rather than DMGs.
StuffIt is a thing you might be nostalgic about if you used MacOS 7 through 9 or so in the 90's. I'm surprised it still exists, I don't recall using it on OS X at all.
I think it was there for the first few years. I seem to remember a revised app icon when they went from 32x32 to 128x128. I don't think it mattered much, though.
It was basically the zip file for Mac, and almost all software was downloaded as a .sit file. Stuff from Macintosh Garden is still mostly in .sit or .toast
Yes, though it's much worse than zip! I recall having tons of issues with incompatibility between different .sit files and different versions of the unarchiver. I don't know if I've ever heard of any binary incompatibility issues with zip files.
Note that they stopped updating everything in 2020, I think the expander apps should still work (I don't see why not). The company owning it is focusing on... some software for cellphone carriers, I think.
Be aware, after entering the site ,I didnt click on anything and I just found out that a dmg file has been downloaded on my phone. Not sure how its that possible, but it happened.
Well - either stuffit/someone who hacked stuffit cleverly infiltrated one of the base browser protections against downloading files without an interaction across multiple browser implementations but forgot your phone can't run programs in dmg format leading them to a dead end of infiltration... or your phone registered a tap you didn't desire it to. (all assuming the dmg was for stuffit, it's possible the file just came from elsewhere if not)
The company is busy doing other things, but the domain is probably critical to protect lest a nefarious actor buys it and hosts Stuffit-masquerading malware.
Companies hate it when their teams buy new domains as it often commits them to protecting those domains for a very long time just in case.
Case in point- I worked for a company who had a domain name that was connected to a CMS. Once it expired someone else bought it and put an exact copy of the old site on it including the admin login page. An unsuspecting user could easily enter their password there.
