On 3/8/2014 1:35 PM, Tom Frikker wrote:
I've read about MacBinary and BinHex, two programs that supposedly can
combine the resource forks so that they're saved when transferring from
MFS to HFS. Are these programs available as disk images, or are they
built into the OS?
http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/help/Contents/Concepts/MacBinary.html
http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/help/Contents/Concepts/BinHex.html
BinHex uses standard "low" ASCII text characters which all have the 8th
bit as a zero.
The reason for that is the original e-mail system was designed for
English text and only transmitted the first 7 bits of each character.
The 8th bit (always zero) was automatically added at the receiving end.
Not transmitting the always the same 1/7th of the data was a significant
time and bandwidth savings in the 70's and 80's.
Some 7 bit routers on the internet survived into the 90's. Many sites
serving Macintosh software had two small test files, one MacBinary, one
BinHex so the user could download them quickly to see if they could both
be opened. If the MacBinary test file was corrupted, your internet
traffic was going through a 7 bit router somewhere. If the BinHex file
was corrupted you had more serious problems.
7 bit routers would also make hash of UUENCODE, an 8 bit binary to text
encoding used for posting to Usenet and making attachments to e-mail
that doesn't support binary attachments. If you were stuck behind a 7
bit router, the .binary Usenet groups were useless to you, unless you
could get someone to post in BinHex.
If you could download MacBinary OK then that's what you wanted to
download because the files were quite a bit smaller than the BinHex
version - quite important when users were charged by time and/or amount
of data.
BinHex and UUENCODE can be used to pass binary files via e-mail systems
that don't support attachments at all. First you need a program to
convert the file to encoded text. Second, open the encoded file in a
text editor then copy and paste into an e-mail, include some text
denoting where the file begins and ends so the recipient knows what to
copy and paste into their text editor.
If the encoded file is too large for a single e-mail, simply split it
amongst 2 or more. The recipient will have to paste the chunks, without
empty lines between, into a single text file. To decode a BinHex .HQX
file just use Stuffit Expander. Standalone programs to encode/decode
UUENCODE likely aren't common now, may be old and incompatible with
current systems due to most email services allowing attachments.
Hmmm, could be a way around Gmail's stupid blanket block on executable
files instead of them using a virus/malware scanner... ;)
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