Mike Gleason and Bruce Grubb’s Mac site list lists over 40 mac anonymous ftp sites (some with notes), over 100 Mac web pages, contains some instructions on how to use anonymous ftp and find files as well a format chart showing which programs decompress and decode which files and a section on how to use certain decoded files.

Mac-Site-list, HTML Version 5.0.1

Introduction

From: BruceG6069@aol.com (Bruce Grubb)

This is a update (Feb 15, 2006) to Mike Gleason and Bruce Grubb’s Mac Site list. It lists over 50 mac anonymous ftp sites (some with notes), over 100 Mac web pages, and contains some instructions on how to use anonymous ftp and find files as well a Format Chart showing which programs decompress and decode which files and a section on how to use certain decoded files.

Credits:
To Mike Gleason for the original Mac-FTP-list and giving me permission to continue it.
To Stairways Software for their Interarchy program without which it would be next to impossible to maintain this.

Note to World Wide Web users: Mac-Site-list is accually composed of three crosslinked files which CANNOT be renamed: Mac-site.css, mac-site-list.html and site-section.html.

The advantage of this set-up is not only is it easier for me update and edit but people can go directly to the site section without slugging through the rest of the document.

Changes: Format chart updated; pages reworked, archive set up removed.

Added sites/URLs: None;

Defunct sites/URLs: none;

Note: Mike Gleason no longer supports this list and has given me his kind permision to continue it.

Revisions notices posted Quarterly to the USENET newsgroups comp.sys.mac.comm, comp.sys.mac.misc, and comp.sys.mac.games.misc.

Home links:

.html

http://members.aol.com/BruceG6069/mac-site-list.html
http://members.aol.com/BruceG6069/site-section.html.

.txt file

Format chart section; format-chart-153.txt, same sites as .hqx file.

Copyright 2006 by Bruce Grubb with document concept and portions of its text Copyright 1991 by Mike Gleason. May be freely distributed and archived.

Please send newly discovered macintosh sites (with directories to check), bug fixes, and comments to:

Internet: BruceG6069@aol.com
AOL: BruceG6069

For folks new to the Mac Site list

The Mac-Site-list is composed of four parts: the introduction (this section), Mac FTP sites (some with notes), Mac related http sites, and finally some search engines.

The FTP section now list sites by name as most ISPs have gotten their DSN servers to the point that listing IP numbers was totally redundent. However if a link does not work MacOS X’s Network Utility will be your tool of choice (Interarchy has these tools as well for thost still using MacOS 9.x or older). If these tools cannot find the site then it has either gone down, been removed, or is too slow (ie getting timeout errors).

Keep in mind that some sites may disenable the anonymous login for a while: during certain hours of the day, for maintainance reasons, or because of too much heavy traffic. Most will tell you the reason for refusing anonymous login, but a few will say nothing more than ‘User anonymous unknown’ or ‘connection refused’. Keep this in mind when a site on this list seems to be unreachable.

There are five main formats Mac files on the Internet occur in: BinHex 4.0 (.hqx extension), MacBinary (.bin), stuffit (.sit and .sitx), and MacOS X disk images (.dmg). MacOS X will open .dmg files on its own and Stuffit Expander can handle the rest.

Word of warning: .sit files do not support Unix permissions and can have problems with file or programs that depended on them. Politely inform any developer of MacOS X software you like who is using .sit to switch to using .sitx; its a smaller format and can be expanded via Stuffit 7.x which will run on any MacOS 8.6 or higher (yes that DOES include Classic! So MacOS X 10.0-10.1.4 users can expand .sitx files though they have to boot into MacOS 9 to install Stuffit Expander 7.x)

With all the web pages out there you may wonder why there is still an FTP section. The simple fact of the matter is FTP has less overhead than http. However that said http does have many advantages over ftp especially as browsers generally make for poor FTP clients. My personal Mac FTP client of choice is Interarchy - it the most powerful Mac FTP client I have used and has very powerful networking tools built into it. A list of alternative browsers, FTP clients, and Telnet programs can be found at The Mac Orchard web page.

On a unix shell account, ftp prompts you for a username and password; you send “anonymous” as the username, and your email address as the password. Most browsers and MacOS FTP clients will do this automatically if they have been set up properly. For the few that don’t or can’t try doing your URLs in this variation of the Common Internet Scheme Syntax. - ftp://anonymous:email_address@sitepath.

Decoding and decompressing files

Most files are compressed and then encoded. This is represented by a series of different extensions at the end of the file name which are outlined below. Two formats to stear clear of are .exe and .sea as these are used for self extracting formats; with extracting tools available, the crossplatform problems these formats have, and their succeptability to all the other problems that plague regular programs there is little reason for anyone to be using them any more.

Here’s a handy chart to keep track which programs unmangle which formats:

D = Decode/decompress only
C = Create/compress only
I = MacBinary format is supported internally only
X = Encode and decode
N = cannot handle sitx format

.sit refers to all versions of the Stuffit format. A ‘/’ denotes the inability to handle certain formats as outlined in the legend above.
.hqx = BinHex4; .bin = BinHex5, MacBinary I, II, and III
Note: Almost every Mac communications program can decode .bin files.

* .b64/.mime (Base 64) refers to the encoding format used by the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. For more information consult the MIME FAQ.

** Stuffit Expander (free) and DropStuff are combined into StuffIt Standard Current public versions are 9.0 (Mac) and 8.0 (Win).

*** MacOS 10.3 and later has .tar, Unix compress, gzip, and .zip built-in and you can use Stuffit expander for nearly everything else.

**** Current versions as of this writing are 12.0 (Mac) and 12.0 (Win).

Other formats

.arc

old (c1990) MS-DOS compresion format, replaced by .zip. Decompressed by Stuffit Expander/Deluxe and MacArc (can also compress).

.arj

PC format common to European sites. Decompressed by unArjMac, DeArj, and Stuffit Expander.

.dmg (related formats - .smi, .image/.img/)

These are all disk image extensions. Dmg is the MacOS X disk image format, .smi was the very short lived self mounting MacOS 9.x disk image format (.image/.img) Disk Utility can mount all these formats and dropDMG is an easier way of creading the DMG format.

.html (.htm)

WWW document. Used by WWW browsers such as Netscape and lynx.

.lzh (related formats - .lha and .lzs)

old PC/Amiga format that is still quite popular in Japan, largely replaced by .arc and .zip elsewhere; decompressed via Stuffit Expander 12, macunpack, LHA Expander 1.0.3, and French KISS 2.2.0. StuffIt Deluxe 12 and MacLHA 2.2.1 also can compress in the lha format.

.rar

A DOS compression format. Handled by MacRAR, StuffIt Expander/Deluxe 12.

.shar

Unix shell archive. Decoded by Unshar.

.taz

another name for .tar.Z

.tgz

another name for .tar.z and .tar.gz {do not confuse with .tar.Z}. The term tarball (which refers to any tar file) has also been used to describe this.

.txt (.abs)

.ASCII text file. There is a slight differance between the ASCII text files of Mac, PCs, and UNIX systems which can cause problems trying to read them. Mac ASCII uses carriage returns, UNIX uses line feeds, and PC uses both.

.z

Suffix used by both Unix pack and early (c1993) Gzip files. Due to confusion between these compression methods and Unix ‘compress’ suffix (.Z) it was abandoned in favor of the .gz suffix. Unix pack itself has been effectively replaced by both Unix compress and Gzip.

CAUTION: While Gzip is aimed at replacing the .Z format, they are different unix compression formats, and the suffixes are not inchangable. Many sites now support on-the-fly translation of these formats; just type in the file name minus the .Z or .gz suffix.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each format?

With so many formats to choose from the question of the advantages and disadvantages of each format come up. All non-Macintosh formats (.zip, .tar, .lzh, etc) require MacBinary internally to properly store Mac programs or files that require a resource fork so when in doubt use a macintosh compression format.

Finding files and programs

If you are looking for a specific mac file or program you will want to use one or more of the many search engines available , some of which are listed in the WWW section as I have no idea where individual files are located.

Using files

The best thing to do with a file you have down loaded and are unsure how to open it it to try to figure out what broad type of file it is: Word Processor, picture, sound, or movie.

Word Processor

Tex-Edit Plus will read most of these out there though some will require Adobe Acrobat Reader (.pdf), or OpenOffice. If these fail then you may have to resort to a commerical Word Processor such as MS Word or WordPerfect or a convertion utility like MacLinkPlus.

Sound files, Pictures, and Movies

QuickTime is able to handle the majority of the formats available on the Internet but there are a few extensions that will cause problems. AVI will be the one that will generally give the most grief mainly because it is “container format” that can have any combination of video and audio codecs.
Open the file up in Quicktime and Show Movie Info even if QuickTime cannot play it. VLC will be able to play a IV32 based codec while a DivX codec will require something like DivX Doctor II and the related 3ivx Delta codec. (Indeo codecs 4.1 and 5.0 only exist for Classic and 2.0 does not exist on the Macintosh at all). Note that sound can and sometime does use another codec which may or may not exist on the mac.
Flip4Mac can deal with the occational WMV format.

PlayerPro (Freeware) is able to play many MOD files which neither Quicktime or Garageband understands. Development on this now opensource program has started up again so imput would be welcome.

GraphicConverter (Shareware, $35) is one of the most powerful shareware graphic programs for the Mac being able to open 100 different graphic formats (including Ani, dl, gif, and fli/flc) and save in 60 of them. In addition GraphicConverter has editing capablities rivaling those seen in higher priced programs as well as being able to created animated gifs. More details on graphic formats in general can be found in the PC Webopaedia.

Other files

Hopefully there is a document file that tells you what is needed otherwise it is pretty much a lost cause.