Inside Mac CD-ROM

From: Ronald Wayne <appleto_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri Feb 25 19:34:36 2005

You should be able to read an HFS file system under Linux with either
hfsutils (this may have been ported to Windows) or with the HFS
filesystem provided by the kernel. But don't use the HFS filesystem
provided by the Linux kernel. A lot of Mac files from that era had
resource forks, and I don't think that the kernel reads them. On the
otherhand, hfsutils will MacBinary or BinHex files so that all of the
data is preserved. What to read them with is a different issue.

I have this CD-ROM (or maybe a slightly older version). The reader is
quite handy in that it will help you hunt down things quickly. Apple
used to have PDF versions of this documentation on their website and
it was nowhere near as nice to use. (THINK Reference was the other
major implementation, and that was nice too.) Unfortunately, I have
never done any meaningful programming on those old beasts. Enough to
pump the Mandelbrot set to the screen and decide that it was too much
trouble. Properly initializing the toolbox and terminating a program
was quite a job in the Macintosh Toolbox. It did, however, generate
the Mandelbrot set relatively quickly given my naive approach.

I don't know whether to be happy or depressed that those were among
the most in depth set of developer's documentation produced. I have a
huge chunk of this documentation and it is impressive. On the
otherhand, it does feel lacking and it it is complete and feels
lacking, that means the Mac API is lacking.
Received on Fri Feb 25 2005 - 19:34:36 GMT