![]() bin files left the contents of the forks in their original 8-bit format and added a simple header for combining them on reception MacBinary files were thus much smaller than BinHex. This left a problem on the Mac, however, as there was still the need to encode the two forks into one.Ī team effort among Macintosh communications programmers, including Lempereur, resulted in MacBinary. BinHex 5 Īt about the time BinHex 4 was released, most online services started supporting robust 8-bit file transfer protocols such as ZMODEM, and the need for ASCII armoring went away. hqx files were roughly the same size of the. 4.0 first combined the data fork, resource fork and file metadata into a common 8-bit format, ran run length encoding (RLE) on the result to provide some compression, and then ran the 8->6 conversion on the result and protected everything with multiple CRCs. In order to solve all of these problems, Lempereur released BinHex 4.0 in 1985, skipping 3.0 to avoid confusion with the now long-dead BASIC version. Lempereur had concerns about some of the features of BinHex, notably its use of a checksum instead of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and the fact that the metadata information in the header was in plain text and thus could be corrupted in the same way as the data. The new version replaced the earlier ones "overnight". The smaller files were incompatible with the older ones, so the extension became. Even though the new encoding was no longer hexadecimal in nature, the established name of the program was retained. This new encoding used the first 64 ASCII printing characters, including the space, to represent the data, similarly to uuencode. He also took the opportunity to expand the checksum from 8 to 16-bits. For BinHex 2.0, Lempereur used a new 8-to-6 encoding that decreased file size by 50%. The original BinHex was a fairly simple format, one that was not very efficient because it expanded every byte of input into two, as required by the hexadecimal representation-an 8-to-4 bit encoding. The program was roughly a hundred times as fast as the BASIC version, and soon upgrade requests were flooding in. The BASIC version was very slow, so Lempereur ported BinHex 3 to assembler and released it as BinHex 1.0. Yves Lempereur, author of the first assembler for the Mac, MacASM, found that in order to upload his files to CompuServe he had to use BinHex. Several newer versions were published during 1984, resulting in BinHex 3 that could encode both forks. The rise in use of Internet e-mail coincided roughly with the release of the Macintosh, and Davis's version was posted on the Info-Mac mailing list by Joel Heller in June 1984. This version only supported encoding of the "data fork", ignoring the resource fork, which meant it could only be used for data files. In April 1984, William Davis ported BinHex to the Mac using Microsoft BASIC to produce a version that was largely identical to the TRS-80 versions of the same era. The file upload problem still existed on CompuServe when the Mac was first released in 1984. CompuServe later added support for 8-bit transfers, and the format quickly disappeared. Ports soon appeared for other popular platforms of the era, including the Apple II. īinHex files of the era were typically given the file extension. Bill Stockwell converted that version to the BASIC/S compiler, which ran much faster than Mann's interpreted version. The system quickly gained the addition of a checksum at the end of every line to check for errors. The system became very popular after Mann uploaded it to CompuServe's TRS-80 files area. It then added a newline after every 60 characters. The original ST-80 system worked by converting the binary file contents to hexadecimal numbers, which were themselves encoded as ASCII digits and letters. Not everyone used ST-80, however, so Mann wrote BinHex to allow users of other emulators to use the format. BinHex was used for sending files via major online services such as CompuServe, which were not "8-bit clean" and required ASCII armoring to survive. History TRS-80 BinHex (.hex) īinHex was originally written in 1981 by Tim Mann for the TRS-80, as a stand-alone version of an encoding scheme originally built into a popular terminal emulator, ST80-III by Lance Micklus. BinHexed files take up more space than the original files, but will not be corrupted by non-" 8-bit clean" software. ![]() Originally a hexadecimal encoding, subsequent versions of BinHex are more similar to uuencode, but combined both "forks" of the Mac file system together along with extended file information. BinHex, originally short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system that was used on the classic Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail.
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