Archive of comp.binaries.apple2
D Finnigan
comp.binaries.apple2. It seems that "back in the day" the archive was
located at wuarchive.wustl.edu:/usenet/comp.binaries.apple2, but that
site is long-gone by now.
Jerry
Indirectly or directly, much of it was archived by old (and gone)
archives like tybalt.caltech.edu, ground.uiowa.edu, plains.nodak.edu,
etc. Some of it is on asimov as well--files ending with .bsc, .bxy
(BinSCII encoded) often were posted on c.b.a2.
http://www.umich.edu/~archive/apple2/ still has a bunch of old stuff,
as do other sites, but it's not organized in order of posts.
--
--
Jerry awanderin at yahoo dot ca
D Finnigan
Thanks; I'll take a look at those.
Zaleski
> Jerry wrote:
> > D Finnigan <dog_...@macgui.com> writes:
>
> >> I was wondering if anyone knows of an archive of postings to
> >> comp.binaries.apple2. It seems that "back in the day" the archive was
> >> located at wuarchive.wustl.edu:/usenet/comp.binaries.apple2, but that
> >> site is long-gone by now.
>
> > Indirectly or directly, much of it was archived by old (and gone)
> > archives like tybalt.caltech.edu, ground.uiowa.edu, plains.nodak.edu,
> > etc. Some of it is on asimov as well--files ending with .bsc, .bxy
> > (BinSCII encoded) often were posted on c.b.a2.
>
> > as do other sites, but it's not organized in order of posts.
>
> Thanks; I'll take a look at those.
Found 'em. I just uploaded comp.binaries.apple2 and
comp.sources.apple2 to http://www.apple2.info. Tony will get them
posted in the next day or two.
- Paul
D Finnigan
That sources archive wouldn't happen to be the one at funet, would it?
http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/archive/comp.sources.apple2/
D Finnigan
>
> Found 'em. I just uploaded comp.binaries.apple2 and
> comp.sources.apple2 to http://www.apple2.info. Tony will get them
> posted in the next day or two.
>
> - Paul
Any updates on this? I still do not see them on the site.
A2Aviator
file is the most convenient ..
However .. it could be broken down..
D Finnigan
What format are they in now?
A2Aviator
> What format are they in now?
One BFA zip file that contains each month by gzip ..
D Finnigan
That's fine. As long as I can get them to plain text ASCII.
roughana
> That sources archive wouldn't happen to be the one at funet, would it?http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/archive/comp.sources.apple2/
Unfortunately, that is only part of it.
Some material was deliberately not posted to the newsgroup and instead
was made available from an FTP server.
e.g. refer to ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/archive/comp.sources.apple2/volume1/library/asm/crypto/idea.gz
I don't think the material from the FTP server is publicly available
anywhere at the moment.
I feel that this is 'gap' in the knowledge and encourage others to
contact the moderator of the comp.sources.apple2 newsgroup to
encourage him to make this material publicly available again.
If Paul/Tony have the content from the FTP server as well, that would
be great to see.
Regards,
Andrew
D Finnigan
> On Aug 26, 1:12 am, D Finnigan <dog_...@macgui.com> wrote:
>> That sources archive wouldn't happen to be the one at funet, would it?http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/archive/comp.sources.apple2/
>
> Unfortunately, that is only part of it.
> Some material was deliberately not posted to the newsgroup and instead
> was made available from an FTP server.
> e.g. refer to ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/archive/comp.sources.apple2/volume1/library/asm/crypto/idea.gz
> I don't think the material from the FTP server is publicly available
> anywhere at the moment.
Ah, right. I remember reading about that and looking into it, but I
can't remember what become of it, nor have I tried to track down anyone
responsible for the archive. I'll wait a bit for any future developments.
A2Aviator
The files I got were in the form of monthly archives starting from
early 1992 through December 2001.
They are 53K BinSCII segments.
Each month is tar.gzipped.
Several of the archives terminate early on the extraction.
Up through 28-June 1994, the files are sequentially numbered, what I
have starts at 231 and ends at 3594. A quick tally of that range gives
me 2520 files of which approximately 75 are some SHK files already
converted and 20 folders. So thats about 1/3rd missing of that range.
After 28-June the naming conventions change to YYYYMMDD-xx, still
tarballed by the month.
These account for 4278 files, again 53K BinSCII segments.
I have a list of the subjects of the posts, that accounts for 7632
posts over the period spanning the archives.
I also have CDs that have the wustle and other archives from the era
on them.
My plan is to post the contents of this in the same year/month
breakdown, and a file that contains the listings of the files by file
#/date posted and by file name. I will try to post two sets of these,
one that represents only what is actually made available and one
complete, or I'll have the file with a column in it that says it
exists or not.
The sanity of the archives is not going to be checked at first,
otherwise it will never get posted. A sampling of data shows that if I
have the file converted from BinSCII that it's got a very good chance
of being complete.
The issues run into where the chronological order of the files has
gaps in it, so far if all BinSCII segments are there, the samplings
have shown proper extraction.
I need to do some more voodoo with Excel to line up these two lists,
then it would be a bit easier to see at a glance what is missing. It
takes grep voodoo.. that I'm not as proficient at, to get that to
happen at the blink of an eye, so I have to do it the manual way.
D Finnigan
--------------------------------
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:45:52 -0400
From: "D. Finnigan" <dog...@macgui.com>
To: Tony Diaz <td...@apple2.org>
Subject: Re: Archive of comp.binaries.apple2
In-Reply-To: <e36fb3760909150949j2c...@mail.gmail.com>
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<e36fb3760909150949j2c...@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:49:02 -0700, Tony Diaz <td...@apple2.org> wrote:
> I started this hairbrained project of converting it all back to proper
> files as I seemed to have the uncanny ability to pick three or four
> archives that each were corrupted.
>
> So I dropped them all on a decompressor and seems that 5 were bad.
>
> Anyhow, seeing that they are all binSCII, 6300+ files, of which 2/3rds
> may be legit archives and the rest are text messages...
>
> I want to post it in a presentable format which I'm trying to work out
> exactly what that would be, still.
>
> No way in hell am I'm going to subject myself to CiderPress's wickedly
> whacked UI 6300 times. 3 times is too many.
>
> ..thinking of creating a BinSCII decoder script so that they could
> just be done in shell. If the file has nothing relevant in it, skip
> it. If not, process it. Since they are in sequential order it should
> be the next file has the continuation of the last. Then the result
> should be a directory full of messages named in the sequence and a
> bunch of .shk files.
>
If you send me the archives, then I can write a script. I am sufficiently
knowledgeable in PHP such that if I can get the specs for BinSCII, then I
can write a script to parse them. I have already written a script in PHP
which reads the catalogs off of DOS 3.3 and ProDOS disks and outputs the
catalog formatted exactly as it looks on a real Apple II.
--------------------------------
My offer is still open.
A2Aviator
> My offer is still open.
..and if you read that and then read the message I posted, you'll see
that the binscii issue, at least it's implied that it has been dealt
with.
It's been dealt with.
"Decoding BinSCII ain't like reading catalogs. Without precise
calculations we could fly right through the end of an archive, or
bounce to close to the end of a file and that would make the output
really useless, wouldn't it?"
The point of my post was a status of it, and my proposal on how to
present the material, and that there is indeed missing material,
corrupted or incompatible gzipped tarballs, and what not.
BinSCII is the least of the problem. Gotta get all the material
first.
Jeff Blakeney
>> ..thinking of creating a BinSCII decoder script so that they could
>> just be done in shell. If the file has nothing relevant in it, skip
>> it. If not, process it. Since they are in sequential order it should
>> be the next file has the continuation of the last. Then the result
>> should be a directory full of messages named in the sequence and a
>> bunch of .shk files.
>>
>
> If you send me the archives, then I can write a script. I am sufficiently
> knowledgeable in PHP such that if I can get the specs for BinSCII, then I
> can write a script to parse them. I have already written a script in PHP
> which reads the catalogs off of DOS 3.3 and ProDOS disks and outputs the
> catalog formatted exactly as it looks on a real Apple II.
Why not use Spectrum with the BinHQX XCMD to write a script to decode
each of the BINSCII files? :)
D Finnigan
I was just offering to help, that's all... If you need something different,
then I could help with that too.
Anthony Adverse
Anthony Adverse
andrew....@writeme.com
> What did happen to them?
Dagen Brock
https://github.com/digarok/unbinscii
Far from complete or perfect,but I tried to document the format too in case someone else wants to make one.