Unix executables, still

[Kurt J. Meyer]

Am 15.05.2008 um 20:31 schrieb Donald A. Gardiner:

> I don't understand "USB thumb drive."

An USB memory stick.

> First, let me comment on a suspicion that was mentioned early on.   
> There were no PC's involved.  These were documents created by the  
> version of Panorama that was current at the time, on a genuine  
> Apple Macintosh.

> The three documents that I have been working with were originals, I  
> believe, so they may be permanently lost as Jim suggests.  They  
> were from 1997.  However, I have several more of these for 1998 and  
> 1999 that I would like to recover.
> Is there any way of finding out what the extensions should be for  
> these OS 9 documents?

Donald,

you can easily open an Panorama file in Text Edit and -- beside some  
cryptic symbols -- you will quickly find plain text. If your files  
show garbage, something has altered your files, so they became  
unreadable.

If no memory stick and no PC was involved, I have another suspicion:  
In those years of Mac OS 9 and small hard disks, I remember, I made  
use of Aladdin's Stuffit Space Saver. It made a "transparent"  
compression: It compressed files (after a while or when a (defined)  
Finder label was changed); those files looked like uncompressed files  
in the Finder, when Space Saver was on. When you closed such a file  
after editing, it was recompressed on the fly.

That was a nice and useful tool at that time. Now it is a problem,  
because later versions of Allume's Stuffit Expander did and do not  
support Space Saver's compression format anymore. So you could find  
some old files on your Mac that are compressed -- without having  
a .sit suffix. (They perhaps should do so, but not all of them have  
that suffix. I still find some of these files on my Mac.)

Can you make them readable again? Yes, if you still have Classic and  
the Stuffit Space Saver control field on your Mac. Surprisingly --  
and not recommended by Aladdin or Allume -- this little thing still  
works in Classic, and you can use it to decompress those files.  
(Don't forget to switch it off afterwards.)

Kurt
-- 
Kurt J. Meyer
Cologne, Germany