Introducing Tiny Transfer! A simple BinHex archiving and serial transfer tool

[David Cook]

Any plans to implement YMODEM or ZMODEM? I like the ability to resume interrupted transfers.

I haven't decided how I want to proceed. I accomplished the personal goals I had for the project:
1. Archive more of the file attributes than BinHex provides.
2. Make it work in all original Mac operating system versions.
3. Easily transfer individual files (screen shots, drivers, small apps, norton speed test results) to emulators on modern machines.

To do more, I will need to drop support for the Mac 128K, as I have run out of memory. To go faster, I would need to drop BinHex over XModem, as it makes the files larger (and thus takes more time). XModem has a couple of subtle flaws, like being unable to resume from disconnection and no keep alive heartbeat for slower Macs that are busy reading/writing to floppies or compressing packets.

So, I think I'm just going to fix bugs and minor quality-of-life improvements on Tiny Transfer. Anything more and I'll create a different program.

 

[Mk.558]

I agree. The program does what it is supposed to do: take up a small amount of space and facilitate file transfers via two of the most common file transfer protocols: ASCII text for binhex files and XMODEM for binary files. Adding ZMODEM would be cute but you may as well write a whole 'nother program.

For 19200bps 8N1 and small files that you would use on a 128K/512K/512Ke, this program is almost ideal as it fits on a 400KiB MFS floppy with room for other things. For ZMODEM and other stuff, well, I believe that's more of in the realm of more powerful machines that can run ZTerm instead. ZTerm is a bit unpolished from a UI point of view, but it works and was used for many years by many people for a good reason. Turns out those same more powerful computers can use AFP, which is way better.

You shouldn't really have file transfer interruptions on small home networks with good quality connections and stuff.

 

[adespoton]

That's true; I started using ZTerm on a Plus in 1992 (used Mac Kermit before that) and by 1995, ZTerm supported everything I wanted (and still worked on the Plus). I did have drop-outs on Plus-to-Plus transfers via ZTerm on the original version, and also had phone interruptions sometimes when dialing up the Internet mainframe or some local BBS -- when you were transferring kilobytes of data, you could be sitting there for a few hours and then have a bit of noise on the line that killed the entire transfer, forcing you to start over if you were using XMODEM.

But for a 128K - 512Ke, you're already limited to ~300KB of data, so XMODEM is probably the best approach. And BinHex beats the other options even if it bloats the data transfer size. I guess "features" would be things like shrinking its size on disk and/or size in memory, optimizing performance, or having a companion set of apps that could split a file into parts for transfer and then merge them after they'd arrived (thereby avoiding the main issue with XMODEM and also enabling large file transfer when you have to swap floppies to handle all the file parts).

 

[Snial]

<snip> To do more, I will need to drop support for the Mac 128K, as I have run out of memory.<snip>

Mac 128K support is certainly a hallmark of TT, marking it out above other 68K-PPC apps.

Google something like "homebrew add 3rd party casks". <snip> install it manually. Use Pacifist.app <snip> New World Power Macs <snip>

Thanks. My Keyspan is also fairly interesting, because it's based around a TI TUSB3410: an actual programmable 8052 CPU that happens to be dedicated to serial. And it has DMA, because a 2 MIPS, 8052 is still too puny for USB !

Download the raw file ‘keyspan-usa-19hs.rb’ -then install the cask locally. HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1 brew install --cask <cask>

Thanks!