BinHex

History

The file upload problem still existed on CompuServe when the Mac was first released in 1984. William Davis ported BinHex to the Mac using Microsoft BASIC in a simple version that could encode the data fork only, ignoring the resource fork. 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. Several newer versions were published during 1984, resulting in BinHex 3 that could encode both forks.

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. The BASIC version was very slow, so he ported it to assembler and released it as BinHex 1.0. The program was roughly a hundred times as fast as the BASIC version, and soon upgrade requests were flooding in.

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. For BinHex 2.0, Lempereur used a new 8-to-6 encoding that improved file size by 50% and took the opportunity to add a new CRC error checking routine in place of the earlier checksum. Even though the new encoding was no longer hexadecimal in nature, the established name of the program was retained. The smaller files were incompatible with the older ones, so the extension became .hcx, c for compact. Unfortunately, the compact format also had its problems. The 6-bit encoding produced a number of characters that some foreign-language mail programs would convert into local versions, thereby destroying the file. In addition, the file metadata information was still placed in the file in plain text, and therefore could become corrupted in the same fashion.

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. 4.0 carefully selected its character mappings to avoid ones that were translated by mail software, encoded all the information including the file information and protected everything with multiple CRCs. The resulting .hqx files were roughly the same size of the .hcx's, but much more robust.

(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)



:$f*TEQKPH#jdCA0d,R0TG!"6594%8dP8)3#3"!&m;!*!%EMa6593K!!%!!!&mFNa;
KG3,r!*!$&[rr$3d,BQPZD'9i,R4PFh3!RQ+!!"AV#J#3!i!!N!@QKUjrU!#3'[q
3"&4&@&483N)f!3#Xaj6bV-H8mJ!!!B3!N!0"!*!$[3#3!cR@iiY)!*!'[I%4!!J
Fp$X%X3@J!mZE6!GRiKUi$HGKMf0U61S46%i1"AB!TI,fLl!d1X3RDDE8ALfTCbM
8UP9p4iUqY-0k4krHpk9XK@`rbj2Ti'U@5rGH@+[fr-i4T6-qXpfl26,k!H5$Nml
TIkI'(l3GI4)f8mII&01CNEbC2LrNLBeaZ1HG@$G8!Z6"k)hh,q9p"r6FC*!!Se"
(ic,Pd(4(b`pflKC`H1&JN5;)GVX3mREdH55[l`%`Yhp%q092c`A(hPV)!83Dr&f4;
$$L#I1aM-"VjqV-q$34KQq6$M$f8#,Zc,i),!(`*ZN!$K$rS!LA%3cL+dYi"@,K(
Z"`#3!fKi!!!: