Subject: Prehistory of BinHex Date: Tue, 25 Nov 97 16:21:31 -0800 From: Yves Lempereur To: "Tim Mann" Tim, I happened to visit your "Tim Mann's TRS-80 Page" and read the "Prehistory of BinHex". I didn't know you were at the source of it all. > The path onward from that point is mostly unknown to me. Well, here it is: In 1984 I got involved with Mac development and got myself a CIS account. I discovered that in order to transfer Mac files over CIS, you had to use a BASIC program called BinHex 3.0. It was extremely slow, but did the job fairly well. Having recently finished the first available Editor/Assembler for the Mac (MacASM), I set out to rewrite BinHex 3.0 in 68000 assembly language. It took about a week to write. I called it BinHex 1.0 and uploaded it to CIS. People went crazy, BinHex 1.0 did in 30 seconds what took BinHex 3.0 half an hour. They very quickly asked for a better format. I then wrote BinHex 2.0, which encoded 6 bits per character instead of four, extended the checksum from 8 bits to 16 bits, but retained backward compatibility with the previous format and changed the extension from .hex to .hcx (c for compact). The .hcx format replaced the .hex format overnight. There were a few things I still didn't like about the format, the header info was still encoded in clear text and the checksum was pretty simple. I created an 8 bit format to represent any Mac file which used modern features such as CRCs, ran it through an RLE compacter and then through the 8->6 bit encoding scheme. I changed the extension to .hqx and called the new version BinHex 4.0 to not confuse anybody (the BASIC version was called 3.0). Once again, the new version replaced the previous one overnight. About a year later, I was part of the team that created the MacBinary format and wrote BinHex 5.0 to support it. It was only about three years ago, when I got myself onto the Internet, that I discovered BinHex 4.0 hadn't died when I released 5.0. In fact, it was the de facto standard for exchanging files over the Internet. MacBinary II is slowly replacing it, but it is quite entrenched... Yves ----------------------------------------------------- Yves Lempereur Westlake Village, CA, USA skyrider@pacificnet.net http://www.wp.com/skyrider PGP Public Key, send blank eMail to key@PublicKey.com -----------------------------------------------------