http://www.os2museum.com/wp/looking-for-high-sierra/ OS/2 Museum OS/2, vintage PC computing, and random musings [os2floppy] Skip to content * Home * About + Wanted List * OS/2 History + OS/2 Beginnings + OS/2 1.0 + OS/2 1.1 + OS/2 1.2 and 1.3 + OS/2 16-bit Server + OS/2 2.0 + OS/2 2.1 and 2.11 + OS/2 Warp + OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition + OS/2 Warp 4 + OS/2 Timeline + OS/2 Library o OS/2 1.x SDK o OS/2 1.x Programming o OS/2 2.0 Technical Library + OS/2 Videos, 1987 * DOS History + DOS Beginnings + DOS 1.0 and 1.1 + DOS 2.0 and 2.1 + DOS 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 + DOS 3.3 + DOS 4.0 + DOS Library * NetWare History + NetWare Timeline + NetWare Library * Windows History + Windows Library * PC UNIX History + Solaris 2.1 for x86 - Deeper Into ATA History Looking for High Sierra Posted on October 29, 2021 by Michal Necasek Some time ago, I thought it would be useful to understand exactly what is the difference between CD-ROMs recorded in the old High Sierra format versus the ISO 9660 standard. This was in part spurred by the fact that I have a number of CD-ROMs/images that use the High Sierra format (Microsoft Programmer's Library, some IBM Developer Connection issues, OS/2 Warp 4, and more) that both macOS and Windows 10 refuse to mount. The other part of my motivation was the usual insatiable curiosity. Finding the actual text of the High Sierra Working Paper (also High Sierra Proposal, i.e. proposed standard) turned out to be rather unexpectedly difficult. I found a number of articles talking about the High Sierra Proposal (HSP) but not the actual HSP text. The closest thing I could find was an article in the excellent PC Tech Journal in the July 1987 issue (Patterning CD-ROM by Peter Jansson, page 163). Said article recaps the HSP in very good detail but it's not the actual text. But even that was enough to show that although the structure defined in the High Sierra format is not far from the ISO 9660 standard, the two data structures are just different enough to be mutually incompatible. Even though the High Sierra Proposal is long obsolete, and it never even was an official standard, it was the de facto standard from mid-1986 until ISO 9660 was approved. In addition, it wasn't about until July 1988 that MSCDEX 2.0 with ISO 9660 support started shipping, which means that until then CD-ROMs in ISO 9660 format would have been unusable in practice. It was even worse than that. MSCDEX shipped with CD-ROM drives, and existing CD-ROM drive owners had MSCDEX 1.x which only supported the High Sierra format (HSF). MSCDEX 2.0 was not a free upgrade, which is why until about 1990, CD-ROMs in ISO 9660 format were exceedingly rare. The same problem was presumably present on the mastering side: Existing CD-ROM publishers had software which supported only the High Sierra format and since it worked just fine, they weren't motivated to spend money (probably quite a lot of it) on upgrades. Since ISO 9660 isn't really any more capable than the original HSF, publishers had very little incentive to use ISO 9660 and a lot of good reasons to stick with HSF. As a case in point, Microsoft's C 6.0 (May 1990) or Programmer's Library 1.4 (June 1991) CD-ROMs used the High Sierra format, not ISO 9660. That in turn meant that CD-ROM file system implementors were forced to support HSF for many years to come, otherwise users would rightfully complain that CD-ROMs that can be read just fine in DOS aren't recognized. Sometimes CD-ROM publishers used HSF well into the 1990s for no apparent reason (e.g. IBM Warp 4 CD-ROM from 1996), but no one really noticed because everything worked just fine. The High Sierra Working Paper (the actual title of the proposal) used to be available from NISO (National Information Standards Organization) in the late 1980s, but once ISO 9660 was approved, official standards bodies had no reason to distribute the obsolete proposal. For the few people who needed the original text, the High Sierra proposal used to be available from Howard Kaikow, but he passed away in 2011. The full text of the HSP was almost certainly published in the 1986 book CD-ROM Standards: The Book by Julie Schwerin, ISBN 0904933547. The book is long out of print and not available used. I would love to get a copy (it should contain several related articles) but I just can't find any. Okay, so there's no way to get the HSP through the front door. But maybe an alternate route might work? Surely someone must still have the full text. My research showed that the original HSP editor was Howard Kaikow, which is why he was able to offer copies years later. I contacted his sister Rita but she was unfortunately not able to help me (not for lack of trying). The next name on my list was Bill Zoellick, former manager of software research at TMS, Inc. and not coincidentally, co-author of a 1987 book titled File Structures: A Conceptual Toolkit. In 1986-1987, he published several articles dealing with the technical details of the High Sierra Proposal. Tracking him down was not entirely easy but after piecing together the evidence from several sources, I concluded that the Bill Zoellick who now teaches marine biology really is the same Bill Zoellick who was involved in the High Sierra Group 35 years ago. I e-mailed him and not much later, I had a freshly scanned copy of the High Sierra Working Paper in my inbox. The High Sierra Working Paper I ran the scan through OCR, which as a side effect did a good job of straightening the text (the text of the original was impressively askew on many pages). The document is now available here, and as far as I know, not available anywhere else. After actually looking over the HSP, it became clear that it really was a draft of ISO 9660. The two texts are rather similar, with many sentences and paragraphs entirely identical, and many others with just minor editorial differences. The true technical differences between the HSP and ISO 9660 are not many, but one is that the descriptor signature changed from 'CDROM' to 'CD001' and the general descriptor layout changed just enough that everything is at a different offset. The upshot is that even though software supporting HSP can be easily adapted to support ISO 9660 and vice versa, since the overall structure is quite similar, it does require a couple of small but key changes. That's exactly why software which only supports ISO 9660 (like the CD-ROM image mounting software in Windows or macOS) has no chance of reading High Sierra images (it is difficult to call them ISOs). More or less for the heck of it, but also in order to get a plain-text-ish version of the document for easier comparisons and for easy navigation within the document, I also produced a HTML version of the High Sierra Working Paper. It looks somewhat like the original, but it's deliberately not using any CSS, which means that it can be almost perfectly displayed by antique browsers, like this Netscape Communicator 4.61 in OS/2 Warp 4 Convenience Pack 2. [yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7][hsg-wp-nsos2-640x480]Ancient browser, brand new HTML I've not been able to find how the original High Sierra Working Paper was produced, i.e. what word processing/document processing software was used. I am fairly certain that the serif font used for the body of the text is Palatino... which only narrows it down to "printed on a PostScript printer", i.e. not much at all. I have no idea what kind of software would have been used at Digital Equipment Corporation (where Howard Kaikow worked at the time) for this purpose back in 1986. I'm now working on a longer article which will deal with the history of the High Sierra Group, examine the rationale behind the HSP, and attempt to track how the High Sierra Working Paper morphed into ISO 9660 via ECMA-119. That will still take some work and it'll be published when it's ready. This entry was posted in CD-ROM, Documentation, PC history. Bookmark the permalink. - Deeper Into ATA History 10 Responses to Looking for High Sierra 1. [yH5B][2ab8] techfury90 says: October 29, 2021 at 5:48 pm I suspect the paper was typeset using an early version of VAX DOCUMENT, which DEC began to use to typeset documentation with in the mid-1980s. IIRC, DOCUMENT mainly consists of a pipeline that transmogrifies DEC's special SGML dialect (known as SDML) into TeX, from which it can then be output as either PostScript, DECW$BOOK (an online documentation format similar to IBM's old BookManager), plain text, (or in later versions) HTML. The earliest example of a DOCUMENT-generated manual I could find was this VAX/VMS 4.0 installation guide from 1984: http:// bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/4.0/ AA-Y514A-TE_Guide_to_VAX_VMS_4.0_Software_Installation_198409.pdf The style sheets seem to have changed over the years, as I'm used to seeing DOCUMENT-generated manuals that look more like this: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/rt11/v5.6_Aug91/ AA-5281E-TC_Introduction_to_RT-11_Aug91.pdf And for those curious, here is the SDML source for the set of manuals that last one came from: ftp://ftp.trailing-edge.com/pub/ rt_dists/doc56/archive/rt-11/ (Note the use of EPS illustrations, too...) BTW, if you're wondering what HTML output from later versions of DOCUMENT looks like: https://www.hoffmanlabs.com/vmsfaq/ vmsfaq.html 2. [yH5B][b8fb] Jason Stevens says: October 29, 2021 at 8:52 pm Another reason dos 6 was great, disk compression, high memory mapper and CD-ROM extensions v2! What a bargain I had so many issues mounting that super old Microsoft reference cdrom, yet people say they could mount the image I made no problem I wonder if some way of ripping it converted the format or maybe it was just physical 3. [yH5B][0c77] Zir Blazer says: October 30, 2021 at 3:26 am It amazes me that some people still hoards stuff that has been technically obsolete for near 40-50 years, and even has an idea of where it is as to be able to quickly locate it to give it away the day than THAT person comes asking for it. Reminds me of the famous scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where you have a Crusader guardian that waited more than half a millenia for someone to come looking for the Holy Grail. Is like if these people has been conscious from the start than at some point their stuff was going to become some sort of museum piece... 4. [yH5B][704a] Yuhong Bao says: October 30, 2021 at 3:34 am And I believe that MSCDEX 2.1 introduced support for DOS 4.0, and the lack of adoption of it probably did not help either. 5. [yH5B][41b1] Chris M. says: October 30, 2021 at 4:52 am One of the earliest OSes that supported High Sierra out of the box was GS/OS for the Apple IIgs in 1988. Funny to think that the Apple II got native support before most computers of the day. Looking at the source for the High Sierra file system translator, ISO9660 support was added fairly earlier (Feb 1988). Apple Extensions to ISO9660 were also added at regular intervals. Outside of newer ISO9660 revisions, GS/OS has read every CD I've thrown at it. Later ISO revisions usually got weird things like a semi-colon+digit appended to a file name, but usually worked fine. 6. [yH5B][8f7d] Michal Necasek says: October 30, 2021 at 6:06 pm Normally ripping doesn't touch the format, although I think I've seen ripping programs shoving their signature in the ISO 9660 descriptor or some such nastiness. Microsoft definitely used High Sierra until at least 1991 and a lot of newer software can't deal with it. 7. [yH5B][8f7d] Michal Necasek says: October 30, 2021 at 6:09 pm Yes, Apple was active in High Sierra and had very early CD-ROM support. Microsoft was also early, but their support was not exactly out of the box since they decided to go through CD-ROM drive vendors instead. The semi-colon+digit is DEC style file versioning which normally stays hidden. DEC seems to have most influenced the ISO 9660 format, but Apple and Microsoft both made sure that it'd work well for them too. 8. [yH5B][8f7d] Michal Necasek says: October 30, 2021 at 6:58 pm Thanks for the tip, this sounds highly plausible. The 1984 document does appear to use the same Palatino font... but 1984 is kind of early for PostScript. Then again DEC appears to have been a very early PostScript supporter so maybe? 9. [yH5B][41b1] Chris M. says: October 30, 2021 at 9:44 pm Pretty sure The Apple LaserWriter was the first PostScript printer and that came out in 1985. The typefaces included were much older though, so it wouldn't be unusual to see those fonts being used in other typesetting applications. 10. [yH5B][63de] Richard Wells says: October 31, 2021 at 12:14 am The Apple LaserWriter was the first PostScript printer but Adobe had an add-on earlier that made other printers into PostScript printers. The following snippet is from Seybold's World of Digital Typesetting 1985 supplement: "Adobe PostScript software raster image processor in C (Unix) for 68000 or VAX to drive Xerox XP- 12 or other print engines (1983)." Note VAX is DEC and DEC had a long history of supplying typesetting systems since the Typeset 8 of 1968. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. * Archives + October 2021 + September 2021 + August 2021 + July 2021 + June 2021 + May 2021 + April 2021 + March 2021 + February 2021 + January 2021 + December 2020 + November 2020 + October 2020 + September 2020 + August 2020 + July 2020 + June 2020 + May 2020 + April 2020 + March 2020 + February 2020 + January 2020 + December 2019 + November 2019 + October 2019 + September 2019 + August 2019 + July 2019 + June 2019 + May 2019 + April 2019 + March 2019 + February 2019 + January 2019 + December 2018 + November 2018 + October 2018 + August 2018 + July 2018 + June 2018 + May 2018 + April 2018 + March 2018 + February 2018 + January 2018 + December 2017 + November 2017 + October 2017 + August 2017 + July 2017 + June 2017 + May 2017 + April 2017 + March 2017 + February 2017 + January 2017 + December 2016 + November 2016 + October 2016 + September 2016 + August 2016 + July 2016 + June 2016 + May 2016 + April 2016 + March 2016 + February 2016 + January 2016 + December 2015 + November 2015 + October 2015 + September 2015 + August 2015 + July 2015 + June 2015 + May 2015 + April 2015 + March 2015 + February 2015 + January 2015 + December 2014 + November 2014 + October 2014 + September 2014 + August 2014 + July 2014 + June 2014 + May 2014 + April 2014 + March 2014 + February 2014 + January 2014 + December 2013 + November 2013 + October 2013 + September 2013 + August 2013 + July 2013 + June 2013 + May 2013 + April 2013 + March 2013 + February 2013 + January 2013 + December 2012 + November 2012 + October 2012 + September 2012 + August 2012 + July 2012 + June 2012 + May 2012 + April 2012 + March 2012 + February 2012 + January 2012 + December 2011 + November 2011 + October 2011 + September 2011 + August 2011 + July 2011 + June 2011 + May 2011 + April 2011 + March 2011 + January 2011 + November 2010 + October 2010 + August 2010 + July 2010 * Categories + 286 + 386 + 3Com + 3Dfx + 486 + 8086/8088 + Adaptec + AGP + AMD + AMD64 + Apple + Archiving + Assembler + ATi + BIOS + Books + Borland + BSD + Bugs + BusLogic + C + C&T + CD-ROM + Cirrus Logic + CompactFlash + Compaq + Compression + Conner + Corrections + Creative Labs + Crystal Semi + Cyrix + DDR RAM + Debugging + DEC + Development + Digital Research + Documentation + DOS + DOS Extenders + Dream + E-mu + Editors + EISA + Ensoniq + ESDI + Ethernet + Fakes + Fixes + Floppies + Graphics + Hardware Hacks + IBM + IDE + Intel + Internet + Keyboard + Kryoflux + Kurzweil + LAN Manager + Legal + Linux + MCA + Microsoft + MIDI + NetWare + Networking + NeXTSTEP + NFS + Novell + NT + OS X + OS/2 + PC architecture + PC hardware + PC history + PC press + PCI + PCMCIA + Pentium + Pentium 4 + Pentium II + Pentium III + Pentium Pro + Plug and Play + PowerPC + Pre-release + PS/2 + QNX + Random Thoughts + RDRAM + Roland + Ryzen + S3 + SCO + SCSI + Seagate + Security + Site Management + SMP + Software Hacks + Solaris + Sound + Sound Blaster + Source code + Standards + Storage + Supermicro + TCP/IP + ThinkPad + Trident + UltraSound + Uncategorized + Undocumented + UNIX + UnixWare + USB + VGA + VirtualBox + Virtualization + VLB + Watcom + Wave Blaster + Western Digital + Windows + Windows 95 + Windows XP + Wireless + WordStar + x86 + Xenix + Xeon + Yamaha OS/2 Museum Proudly powered by WordPress.