1.01 (26 May 91) added support for drives which are not drive 1 and introduced the "uuencoded dump" distribution format
1.1 (14 Oct. 91) the program was largely rewritten: more commands supporting more formats, a fully rewritten interface, and it's now MultiFinder aware and System 7.0 friendly.
1.2 (15 Feb. 92) Fixed seven bugs. Preferences settings are now saved, we've added an options box, an "Extract selected files" command and the "Open file" command was made much more powerful. Plus more than 30 small changes.
1.2.1 (8 March 92) Fixed a bug which caused crashes on some machines and a few minor bugs; resolved an incompatibility with AccessPC 1.0 (which crashes every time it sees a disk which is neither Mac nor MS-DOS, obliging suntar 1.2.1 to intercept disk insertion at a lower level than previous versions did).
1.2.2 (5 April 1992) Fixed a problem occurring with some ROM/System combinations; furthermore, to move/rename a file which is being saved no more causes an error.
1.3 (20 June 1992) We've given our contribution to the Apple/IBM friendship by supporting the multivolume format of the AIX version of tar (it's a POSIX extension, available also in other programs, e.g. GNU cpio). Added a new command, new options and better handling of some error situations. And suntar1.3 is up to 3 times faster when reading and up to 4 times faster when writing to a floppy disk.
1.3.1 (18 July 1992) Fixed one bug.
1.3.2 (31 Oct. 1992) Fixed a number of bugs (a couple bad, a couple as old as 1.1). More powerful dialogs during disk insertion for writing. Recompiled with Think C 5.
1.3.3 (27 Feb. 1993) a few minor bug fixes.
Note
We're writing a 2.0 version which supports SCSI devices (including tapes). Since currently we don't have access to a tape which may be swapped between a Mac and a UNIX machine, beta testers for that feature are welcome.
Known bugs
SuperBoomerang 3.0/4.0 has a bug that creates incompatibilities with suntar and many other applications (the 2.0 version is OK, but it's incompatible with System 7). In other similar cases we modified suntar to become compatible with buggy programs, but in this case that would disable a useful feature and violate Apple rules. Anyway, an option removes the incompatibility (it's not in the options box, but in a 'STR ' resource).
Copyright notice
Suntar (Speranza's un-tar) is freeware, so you may freely distribute it and send it to other public domain archives. If you send it to an archive which is more easily accessible from UNIX machines than from the Mac, you should send it in both forms, the StuffIt archive for who can download it and the uuencoded file (which includes instructions to use it) for those who need to "bootstrap" their communication link between UNIX and the Mac, by creating a Mac disk containing suntar using only UNIX utilities and a 3.5" disk drive connected to an UNIX machine. Some archives might wish to store also the file which allows to perform the bootstrap from an MS-DOS machine.
The color icons were sent us by Mark Duffield who edited and colored the icons we had designed.
Suntar was written in Think-C 4.0.5 and 5.0; the 1.0 version used Symantec's ANSI standard library, but starting from the 1.1 version suntar has a user interface library of its own, built from demo programs by Symantec (MiniEdit.c) and Apple Computer (TESample.c), with a lot of original additions.
We don't know how long we'll have access to the Internet: it's probable that in the future we won't be able to support suntar. We hope that the public availability of the source code will alleviate the problems created by an orphan application.
You may help us to make suntar better by sending your bug reports, suggestions and questions to:
mail address:
Sauro & Gabriele Speranza
via Cappuccini 18
40026 Imola
Italy
(yes, it's the town where a Formula 1 grand Prix takes place)
