NeXT
Veteran Member
I'll be honest that I built my own LAN ecosystem and have not really needed to download files directly from an older PowerPC or 68K mac from The Internet in 15 years so I've missed a lot in the meantime.
However I have been violently reintroduced into what the modern world of classic mac software availability is and oh my god, how the hell do you people function??
Okay, so I have a friend who the other night got a Power Macintosh 6300 family machine and we proceeded to get them setup with MacOS 8.1 because they needed a driver to use their Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 PCI card and for the sake of our sanity it comes with a basic version of Stuffit Expander and our choice of Internet Explorer or Netscape.
Initially they wanted 7.6 but I wasn't ready to curl into a ball and die in a corner because without any way to load software, that mac was never going to be able to get online.
I'm lost. The more I feel around trying to see if there's a better way to do this I don't find anything but extremely stupid hacks which seems wrong given how Apple built their ecosystem to be designed for idiots (and it shows), many of which I don't see a first time user being skilled enough to do on their own, hence why I'm helping someone else which is revealing a pretty massive marble pedestal.
The best way to explain the problem is like an iPhone. When you get a nice and shiny new phone, the first thing it asks is if you want to transfer everything over from your existing iPhone.
What if you have never owned an iPhone? Have fun. The process to get setup is there but since you were clearly not here for the last decade we aren't going to make it clear how to join the cool club.
In this case however it's actually getting software, much less installing it. We have MacintoshGarden and MacintoshRepository being the two big names on the Internet for your Greyware and both do agent detection and will drop down to HTTP if you try to connect with an older browser. The problem is however they are impossibly heavy for these early browsers bundled with MacOS. The sites both eventually fail because they are too busy loading the UI. The obvious solution is "get a newer browser", however didn't we just state that by default the two biggest download sites for the classic mac aren't loadable on the only browser options you have out of the box? It's not like you can go elsewhere. It's also not like the passage of time caused this. Both sites just suck and don't have "simple" pages for early browsers, or at least they aren't created with the fact that if you got a fresh MacOS install, you only have two options and that's it. The HTTP sites are flawed. The HTTPS fearmongering rendered most if not all of the rehosted Macintosh file repositories inaccessible, unless you already have a newer browser....which we can't download because.....well you see the loop?
We ended up having to build a workaround that involved setting up a Filezilla FTP server on the person's laptop, dropping files downloaded using a modern Windows web browser into a folder and then using the built-in FTP client on the bundled browsers to reach across the LAN and download them on the mac. As a group we could not believe this was the only solution for someone completely new to classic macs and had no other available resources to draw from.
Once we did however get the process of how to download files sorted for the individual, we were still stuck with Stuffit files.
I know this problem. I know this problem very well. Stuffit's compression changed over the years and as a result you always needed at least three different versions of Stuffit Expander to unpack almost anything you downloaded, especially if it was a file that at some point had been handled by a FAT filesystem the resource fork got nuked. I solved this problem years ago. It doesn't help in this case though when all you have is the basic Stuffit Expander Apple bundled with the browsers on the install disc.
For those who do not know, that expander is false hope, especially now. If you have a sit file you can just drop it into the icon and one of three things will happen:
-Stuffit Expander opens, then closes and nothing happens.
-Stuffit Expander opens, nags you to buy the full version for faster decompression speeds and tools, then does nothing.
-Stuffit Expander actually does the thing it calls itself and decompresses the file.
More often you get 1 and 2. Well this means whoever stuffed or restuffed the file used a newer version of Stuffit and this very old version doesn't know what to do. On a tangent you won't believe my rage when I found out my copy of Adobe Photoshop 7 was downloaded and came in a sitX file. Yet another version of the compression format which only the last versions of Stuffit Expander supported.
Anyways, the solution here is to download a newer version of Stuffit Expander, like 5 or 5.5 which you can download from a number of places that grabbed it from Aladdin before their site went down (killing the direct links on a number of other older older software sites like mac.org), notably the above mentioned two repositories.....which you can't access from the mac, so we also have to pay the same stupid song-and-dance with FTP to get it on the mac. Now you are faced with the next problem. The installer you have been given has been packed (originally) in an smi file (we could also talk about sea files, but the same still applies). These are SELF-MOUNTING IMAGE files and were specifically designed for people without an existing or functioning copy of Stuffit Expander. You downloaded it. You opened it and it automatically extracted.
Except what you got was StuffitExpanderInstaller55.smi.sit
Yep. You can put self-extracting files into stuffit files and a lot of people did this. In fact, almost every smi you expect to find online is going to be like this and once again because of the above mentioned issues with newer versions of stuffit not working with older expanders and MacOS only shipping with the most basic of shareware versions of Stuffit Expander
YOU ARE SCREWED.
I wish violence upon everyone who partakes in this, either because they believe they can make the file smaller or to preserve the resource fork. Fsck you. Fsck youuuuu.
I'm old enough to remember when many of these file sites gave you the option of an smi or a sit file, specifically to avoid this problem. Presumably this knowledge went away once those sites died and as their contents was reconsolidated, their files were "curated" reorganized and of course, repacked before being uploaded to the current major players of sites.
Once again, there's this marble pedestal where unless you already have a number of applications you cannot actually get onto the mac without having prior access to the files through a mac, nothing is going to work.
I'm on my fifth cigarette now and I and others cannot comprehend how the hell this is at all possible that the Apple community as a whole just forgot about the ground-floor users who have no existing resources to work with and have completely failed to solve this. In comparison to how Bitsavers is accessible from everything with a web browser, there's nothing for the mac. Is this actually how it is or have we missed some other website where it's HTTP, it's the basic text-only formatting and a giant list of locally hosted files that actually solve all these problems?
However I have been violently reintroduced into what the modern world of classic mac software availability is and oh my god, how the hell do you people function??
Okay, so I have a friend who the other night got a Power Macintosh 6300 family machine and we proceeded to get them setup with MacOS 8.1 because they needed a driver to use their Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 PCI card and for the sake of our sanity it comes with a basic version of Stuffit Expander and our choice of Internet Explorer or Netscape.
Initially they wanted 7.6 but I wasn't ready to curl into a ball and die in a corner because without any way to load software, that mac was never going to be able to get online.
I'm lost. The more I feel around trying to see if there's a better way to do this I don't find anything but extremely stupid hacks which seems wrong given how Apple built their ecosystem to be designed for idiots (and it shows), many of which I don't see a first time user being skilled enough to do on their own, hence why I'm helping someone else which is revealing a pretty massive marble pedestal.
The best way to explain the problem is like an iPhone. When you get a nice and shiny new phone, the first thing it asks is if you want to transfer everything over from your existing iPhone.
What if you have never owned an iPhone? Have fun. The process to get setup is there but since you were clearly not here for the last decade we aren't going to make it clear how to join the cool club.
In this case however it's actually getting software, much less installing it. We have MacintoshGarden and MacintoshRepository being the two big names on the Internet for your Greyware and both do agent detection and will drop down to HTTP if you try to connect with an older browser. The problem is however they are impossibly heavy for these early browsers bundled with MacOS. The sites both eventually fail because they are too busy loading the UI. The obvious solution is "get a newer browser", however didn't we just state that by default the two biggest download sites for the classic mac aren't loadable on the only browser options you have out of the box? It's not like you can go elsewhere. It's also not like the passage of time caused this. Both sites just suck and don't have "simple" pages for early browsers, or at least they aren't created with the fact that if you got a fresh MacOS install, you only have two options and that's it. The HTTP sites are flawed. The HTTPS fearmongering rendered most if not all of the rehosted Macintosh file repositories inaccessible, unless you already have a newer browser....which we can't download because.....well you see the loop?
We ended up having to build a workaround that involved setting up a Filezilla FTP server on the person's laptop, dropping files downloaded using a modern Windows web browser into a folder and then using the built-in FTP client on the bundled browsers to reach across the LAN and download them on the mac. As a group we could not believe this was the only solution for someone completely new to classic macs and had no other available resources to draw from.
Once we did however get the process of how to download files sorted for the individual, we were still stuck with Stuffit files.
I know this problem. I know this problem very well. Stuffit's compression changed over the years and as a result you always needed at least three different versions of Stuffit Expander to unpack almost anything you downloaded, especially if it was a file that at some point had been handled by a FAT filesystem the resource fork got nuked. I solved this problem years ago. It doesn't help in this case though when all you have is the basic Stuffit Expander Apple bundled with the browsers on the install disc.
For those who do not know, that expander is false hope, especially now. If you have a sit file you can just drop it into the icon and one of three things will happen:
-Stuffit Expander opens, then closes and nothing happens.
-Stuffit Expander opens, nags you to buy the full version for faster decompression speeds and tools, then does nothing.
-Stuffit Expander actually does the thing it calls itself and decompresses the file.
More often you get 1 and 2. Well this means whoever stuffed or restuffed the file used a newer version of Stuffit and this very old version doesn't know what to do. On a tangent you won't believe my rage when I found out my copy of Adobe Photoshop 7 was downloaded and came in a sitX file. Yet another version of the compression format which only the last versions of Stuffit Expander supported.
Anyways, the solution here is to download a newer version of Stuffit Expander, like 5 or 5.5 which you can download from a number of places that grabbed it from Aladdin before their site went down (killing the direct links on a number of other older older software sites like mac.org), notably the above mentioned two repositories.....which you can't access from the mac, so we also have to pay the same stupid song-and-dance with FTP to get it on the mac. Now you are faced with the next problem. The installer you have been given has been packed (originally) in an smi file (we could also talk about sea files, but the same still applies). These are SELF-MOUNTING IMAGE files and were specifically designed for people without an existing or functioning copy of Stuffit Expander. You downloaded it. You opened it and it automatically extracted.
Except what you got was StuffitExpanderInstaller55.smi.sit
Yep. You can put self-extracting files into stuffit files and a lot of people did this. In fact, almost every smi you expect to find online is going to be like this and once again because of the above mentioned issues with newer versions of stuffit not working with older expanders and MacOS only shipping with the most basic of shareware versions of Stuffit Expander
YOU ARE SCREWED.
I wish violence upon everyone who partakes in this, either because they believe they can make the file smaller or to preserve the resource fork. Fsck you. Fsck youuuuu.
I'm old enough to remember when many of these file sites gave you the option of an smi or a sit file, specifically to avoid this problem. Presumably this knowledge went away once those sites died and as their contents was reconsolidated, their files were "curated" reorganized and of course, repacked before being uploaded to the current major players of sites.
Once again, there's this marble pedestal where unless you already have a number of applications you cannot actually get onto the mac without having prior access to the files through a mac, nothing is going to work.
I'm on my fifth cigarette now and I and others cannot comprehend how the hell this is at all possible that the Apple community as a whole just forgot about the ground-floor users who have no existing resources to work with and have completely failed to solve this. In comparison to how Bitsavers is accessible from everything with a web browser, there's nothing for the mac. Is this actually how it is or have we missed some other website where it's HTTP, it's the basic text-only formatting and a giant list of locally hosted files that actually solve all these problems?
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