1.01 (26 May 91) added support for drives which are not drive 1 and introduced the "uuencoded dump" distribution format
1.1 (14 Oct. 91) the program was largely rewritten: more commands supporting more formats, a fully rewritten interface, and it's now MultiFinder aware and System 7.0 friendly.
1.2 (15 Feb. 92) Preferences settings are now saved, we've added an options box, and more. Unfortunately, this version was extremely bugged
1.2.1 (8 March 92) Bug fixes and a couple of new features.
1.2.2 (5 April 1992)
1.3 (20 June 1992) added support for POSIX tar multivolume archives. And it is much, much faster.
1.3.1 (18 July 1992)
1.3.2 (31 October 1992) Fixed a number of bugs.
1.3.3 (6 March 1993)
2.0 beta 12 (7 Jan 1994) see below
2.0.1 (10 July 1994) a number of bug fixes and a few new features, including a "file truncate" option for the "clear sector" command and better handling of drag&drop
2.0.2 (4 Sept. 94) more bug fixes, and since we could spend a few days in the company of an Exabyte, now the support for tape units is much better
2.0.3 (1 Nov. 94) Two more bug fixes in tape handling, added a uuencoder, and does not automatically close the archive in case of error (it looked a good idea with floppy disks, but it's not with files)
New features of 2.0
a) it can open any volume (including non-mounted ones) and any SCSI
device, hence if you can connect a device to both a UNIX workstation
and a Mac there are chances that you may use it to transfer data.
b) can create tar archives as files on a regular Macintosh volume
c) can create MacBinary and BinHex 4.0 files (and uuencode in 2.0.3)
d) can extract uuencoded files
e) correctly converts MS-DOS text files (even "MS-DOS to UNIX" in 2.0.2)
f) an "extension -> type&creator" table allows a better control of
the file types
g) you may select files to be archived from a scrollable list which
allows multiple selections and UNIX-like pattern matching
h) it knows about how MS-DOS marks defective sectors in floppy disks
i) it may place an empty MS-DOS filesystem on a floppy disk
j) "Extract from sector" is another way to select part of an archive
k) View sector may optionally use a pure hexadecimal representation
l) it supports pathnames longer than 99 characters (unfortunately
there are two different ways to extend tar, both are supported)
m) ejecting the disk is less dangerous since suntar exiting from a
pause now checks that the disk in the drive is the correct one
n) it may create a log file
o) sometimes it's slightly faster
p) no more need to use ResEdit to set buffer sizes and other options
Known bugs
SuperBoomerang 3.0/4.0 has a bug that creates incompatibilities with suntar and many other applications (the 2.0 version is OK, but it's incompatible with System 7). In other similar cases we modified suntar to become compatible with buggy programs, but in this case that would disable a useful feature and violate Apple rules. Anyway, an option removes the incompatibility (it's not in the options box, but among "rarely used options", only in expert mode).
It does not handle correctly multi-volume archives on devices opened by the "Open device" command.
It may have some incompatibilities with System 7.5 or previous incarnations of features made "official" with 7.5. We haven't yet seen a copy of 7.5 so we can't be more precise.
Compatibility
Our experience and/or letters from previous users have reported successful use of suntar in exchanging data with the following UNIX machines:
Sun SPARCstation 1, 1+, 2, IPC, IPX
Sun 386i
IBM RISC/6000
NeXTstation
Solbourne S4000 (a SPARCstation clone)
HP 9000 model 370 with HP9122A or HP9153B drive unit
a Macintosh IIfx running A/UX 3.0 (suntar can read/write its tar archives, I don't know whether it has problems running under it: suntar 1.3 could not find the floppy disk since its name is different under A/UX, suntar 2.0 may open a disk having any name but it was never launched under A/UX )
Only a couple of users reported problems (an HP 9000 and a 386 with SCO UNIX) but I couldn't identify the cause (defective hardware?).
Copyright notice
Suntar (Speranza's un-tar) is freeware, so you may freely distribute it and send it to other public domain archives. If you send it to an archive which is more easily accessible from UNIX machines than from the Mac, you should send it in both forms, the StuffIt archive for who can download it and the uuencoded file (which includes instructions to use it) for those who need to "bootstrap" their communication link between UNIX and the Mac, by creating a Mac disk containing suntar using only UNIX utilities and a 3.5" disk drive connected to an UNIX machine. Some archives might wish to store also the file which allows to perform the bootstrap from an MS-DOS machine.
The routines for MS-DOS disks (IBM-ize and the test for sectors marked bad) are from mtools, a UNIX package by Emmet Gray.
The color icons were sent us by Mark Duffield who edited and colored the icons we had designed.
Suntar was written in Think-C 4.0.5 and 5.0; the 1.0 version used Symantec's ANSI standard library, but starting from the 1.1 version suntar has a user interface library of its own, built from demo programs by Symantec (MiniEdit.c) and Apple Computer (TESample.c), with a lot of original additions.
Furthermore, we must thank all the users of suntar for their suggestions and their help in identifying problems: in particular, the tape support would have never worked without the help of beta tester and their patience in performing tests.
The source code of 1.3.3 is already available in public domain, probably the same will be for 2.0 when the worst bugs will have been discovered and fixed.
You may help us to make suntar better by sending your bug reports, suggestions and questions to:
mail address:
Sauro & Gabriele Speranza
via Cappuccini 18
40026 Imola
Italy
(yes, it's the town where a Formula 1 grand Prix takes place and, sigh, where Ayrton Senna died)
