[HN Gopher] Stuffit - 30 Years of File Compression
___________________________________________________________________
Stuffit - 30 Years of File Compression
Author : modinfo
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-02-15 11:26 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stuffit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stuffit.com)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The StuffIt I remember was created by high school student Raymond
| Lau -- apparently in 1987 (37 years ago) according to Wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt
|
| Always blew my mind that a "kid" wrote this app.
| nytesky wrote:
| 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.
| chongli wrote:
| 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!
| alsetmusic wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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.
| agsnu wrote:
| Isn't Lina just an alter ego of Marcan?
| chongli wrote:
| I believe the GP is referring to Alyssa Rosenzweig.
| Singletail wrote:
| I was at Stuy with him -- he was always very nice.
|
| He was also a big Ddial user.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| Back then it was common to print it all out so you could
| reason with it.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Interesting - I didn't know Waldemar's background. I know him
| as the Google folk hero who asked real questions of the
| executives at TGIF.
| packetslave wrote:
| And who recently got laid off :-(
| mproud wrote:
| 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.
| vr46 wrote:
| It's good, but I've shifted over to Keka
| (https://github.com/aonez/Keka) which is much more modern and
| versatile (and compresses)
| booi wrote:
| Another vote for Keka! Simple, easy to use, finder
| integrated, open source and modern. Love it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Keka isn't open source. It's not even source-available! htt
| ps://github.com/aonez/Keka/blob/fb4292000cf946e6a022d0281..
| .
|
| > 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| StuffIt Expander though was such a common thing in its day. A
| Mac without StuffIt and Expander were just broken.
| LimeLimestone wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| rgovostes wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Stuffit was relevant in the late 80s and 90s. It hasn't really
| been relevant for a long time.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 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
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| renhanxue wrote:
| 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.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I came to post roughly this. I had literally forgotten
| StuffIt was a thing, until the headline brought it all
| flooding back.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I remember many apps being distributed as .sit files on OSX
| at least in the old Tiger and Leopard days.
| piterrro wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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)
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I can't believe this company / domain still exists.
| vr46 wrote:
| 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.
| icameron wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| The parent company Smith Micro doesn't even list stuffit as
| one of their products https://www.smithmicro.com/products/
| timnetworks wrote:
| 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?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| 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.
| ByQuyzzy wrote:
| Is there a good .sit extractor for modern Unix systems? Ideally
| something that would handle resource / data forks?
| ok123456 wrote:
| Aladdin made a Linux version that is statically linked and
| still works.
| hcs wrote:
| 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
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiskDoubler
| evaneykelen wrote:
| 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.
| st3fan wrote:
| 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!
| jval43 wrote:
| 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?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| anon-sre-srm wrote:
| Oh the joys of .sit.hqx.
|
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-17 23:01 UTC)