1.01 (26 May 91) added support for floppy disk drives which are not drive 1
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. 1992) Preferences settings are now saved, we've added an options box, and more
1.2.1 (8 March 92)
1.2.2 (5 April 92)
1.3 (20 June 92) added support for POSIX tar multivolume archives. And it is much, much faster.
1.3.1 (18 July 92)
1.3.2 (31 Oct. 92)
1.3.3 (6 March 1993)
2.0 beta 12 (7 Jan. 1994) see below
2.0.1 (10 July 94)
2.0.2 (4 Sept. 94)
2.0.3 (1 Nov. 94) added a uuencoder
2.0.4 (12 March 1995) may keep its preferences in a separate file (useful for sharing a single copy over a net) and may convert character codes >127
2.0.5 (24 June 95)
2.1 (10 Nov. 1996) see below
2.1.1 (19 Jan. 1997) bug fixes and improvements, added a retry count (we had a lot of 6 years old floppy disks, and in this way we recovered a lot of apparently lost files) and a MIME decoder (just in case you read an E-mail with an application which does not support MIME and you do not know what to do with that file) and AppleSingle/AppleDouble decoders (if the sender of the MIME-encoded message used Eudora, you may need these too)
2.1.2 (12 April 97) a number of bug fixes
2.1.3 (19 Oct. 97) bug fixes, improvements in tape handling (a "Detect block size", now Append works also on tapes), does not block the Macintosh while working with slow SCSI devices (i.e. tapes)
2.1.4 (16 November 1997) unfortunately the PowerPC code in 2.1.3 introduced a bug which caused files to include incorrect data: fixed
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 can 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
New features of 2.1
a) Recompiled with CodeWarrior for both 68000 and PowerPC
b) supports SCSI Manager 4.3 (if you have a machine with two SCSI buses, now suntar does recognize them)
c) it now supports the 4 required Apple events
d) the conversion from an UNIX pathname to the Macintosh way of referring to a file and vice-versa was completely rewritten, getting rid of operations which were not the best way to do things even under System 6. Well, Apple has never told that they were obsolete, anyway they are a clumsy way to do things and we've removed them. You'll probably not notice the difference, but this allows a better handling of some special cases such as folders or files with bad names or which already exist
e) it's possible to access a remote tape via a MacTCP connection to a UNIX machine and using rexec to launch rmt (see separate documentation file)
f) it correctly sets the attributes of an extracted folder which had a System 7-style custom icon
g) it can optionally save all attributes of folders, in case you want to use suntar as a backup application rather than to exchange data with UNIX
h) a new dialog box tells suntar not to bother the user so often and apply a standard solution to typical problems
i) an option to do byte swapping to compensate what may happen using wide (16 bit) SCSI interfaces in machines with different architectures (some users had this problem with a Tandberg tape unit)
Known bugs
It does not handle correctly multi-volume archives on devices opened by the "Open device" command.
It has an incompatibility with the hierachical Apple menu introduced with System 7.5 (Apple menu options) which may recheck the list of recent files, and that takes a lot of time. However, the bug is not ours, "Apple menu option" does the same silly thing also in other situations, e.g. after the failure of a disk initialization, and we could not find a way to avoid that. We've reported the problem to Apple, with no answer.
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, 10
Sun 386i
IBM RISC/6000
NeXTstation
Solbourne S4000 (a SPARCstation clone)
HP 9000 model 370 with HP9122A or HP9153B drive unit
HP 715-50, HP9000/425T and HP9000/807S running Hp-Unix 9.01
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, provided that the documentation and this file are kept with it. You may also include it in any shareware collection on floppy disk, CD-ROM or other means, at the same condition.
We've spent a lot of money lately, buying a PowerMac and the CodeWarrior compiler. So, if you use the most advanced features of suntar (e.g. tape units) you may consider suntar as shareware. For one year suntar was declared "almost freeware" (we were too lazy to break it into two applications, the "full" and "limited", the first being shareware and the second freeware, but that's the concept) however since we've received only one 10 dollars fee, we've removed such declaration from the about box, in order to avoid confusion suntar is again declared freeware, but any payment will encourage us to go on with development. It's rather depressing to discover a blatant bug in the latest version of suntar and get only one bug report three months after its release: suntar is going to die soon if this is the level of interest.
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. Version 2.1 is now compiled with Metrowerks CodeWarrior, without exploiting its libraries.
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 testers and their patience in performing tests; Dominique Petitpierre was certainly the most helpful of them all.
The source code of suntar 2.0.5 had been available in the Apprentice 3 CD-ROM by Celestin Company, and it might be available in Internet some day. Well, suntar 2.1 is more sophisticated, you'll not get the source code.
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)
