Re: PCs & sit format

[Toby Reiter <treiter@cs.oberlin.edu>]

On 14 Jul 1997, Nathan Mates wrote:

> In article <33C95D3C.7170@techie.com>,
> Luis V. Espinoza <laffin@techie.com> wrote:
> >greatly appreciated (source code would be wonderful)
> 
>    We've been thru this before. Inane proprietary data formats are
> fine for a standalone app. However, if you're trying to transmit data
> around, requiring that the data 'can opener' be manufactured by Ye
> Olde Krustie Programming Co. and nobody else is a serious detriment to
> exchanging the data. There's no security benefit or anything else in a
> proprietary format, just stupidity.
> 
>    Public data exchange formats should be well-documented, with either
> detailed filetype notes, or better yet, source code for reading that.
> With that, anyone can port a reader to a system without too much fuss.
> .SIT fails on pretty much all counts for being an open format.

Once again, Nathan, you've been particularly useless. You refused,
completely to answer the original poster's quesiton with "I'm sorry, I
don't know how you can do that...<sniff, sniff>".

To the original poster--you actually CAN unpack these formats! There is
Stuffit Expander available on the PC (sure, it doesn't run on UNIX, but
who cares!).  That should be able to unpack both .hqx (binhexed files) and
.sit (Stuffit archives).  I would ask on a PC software newsgroup about
availability.

Good Luck!

Toby Reiter

p.s. You've probably heard this before, but even though a Newton is an
Apple computer, these newsgroups are specific to the Apple II computer
(which the Newton is not).  A more appropriate group is
comp.sys.newton.misc.