BinHex and Hexadecimal See more » Info-Mac. Info-Mac is an online community, news aggregator and shareware file hosting service covering Apple Inc. Products, including the iPhone, iPod and especially the Macintosh. New!!: BinHex and Info-Mac See more » Internet. BinHex 4.0 Definition - Peter N Lewis, Aug 1991. For a long time BinHex 4.0 has been the standard for ASCII encoding of Macintosh files. To my knowledge, there has never been a full definition of this format. Info-Mac had an informal definition of the format, but this lacked a description of the CRC calculation, as well as being vague in some. BinHex is a third party application that provides additional functionality to OS X system and enjoys a popularity among Mac users. However, instead of installing it by dragging its icon to the Application folder, uninstalling BinHex may need you to do more than a simple drag-and-drop to the Trash.
- For Mac: BinHex type: Release date: 2006/12/20: Copy right: RICOH IMAGING COMPANY, LTD. Preparation of update.Blank, formatted SD card (8MB or more).USB cable I-USB17 If you are copying the firmware update file to the SD card by connecting the camera directly to your computer.
- WinZip can open and extract UUencoded, XXencoded, BinHex, and MIME files (base64, plain/text, and quoted-printable), and can UUencode files. This section explains the need for these features and abilities, includes instructions for using them, and shows how they.
What is really MacBinary and BinHex encoding good for? Since Mac OS X was relased everything has been packed/stuffed/zipped/encoded/compressed so much! Sometimes when I downlad a file, I end up with having 5-6 files and I really only need one of them.
I tried to expriment a little with .bin/.hqx encoding and found out that when I use MacBinary; nothing happens to the file. It just becomes encoded. When I try to BinHex; the file grows bigger!
So, can someone tell me what the binary encoding is good for?
I tried to expriment a little with .bin/.hqx encoding and found out that when I use MacBinary; nothing happens to the file. It just becomes encoded. When I try to BinHex; the file grows bigger!
So, can someone tell me what the binary encoding is good for?
File Format | |
---|---|
Name | BinHex |
Ontology |
|
Extension(s) | .hqx , .hcx , .hex |
MIME Type(s) | application/mac-binhex40, application/mac-binhex, application/binhex |
PRONOM | x-fmt/416 |
Released | 1981 |
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/1/8/9/118943618/566988361.png)
Binhex Format
BinHex is a family of formats used as binary-to-text transfer encodings and/or archive formats (to combine data and resource forks into a single file). It is mainly associated with Macintosh computers.
|
History
BinHex has a somewhat convoluted history. Beginning as a built-in protocol in a TRS-80 terminal program to encode binary files as hexadecimal numbers written in printable ASCII characters for safe transmission to online services that couldn't handle other characters, it was implemented by Tim Mann as a standalone program. The file extension .hex was normally used for files in this format. CompuServe in particular had a problem with bytes out of the 7-bit character range until the mid-1980s, so BinHex was popular for binaries on that service. Macintosh users had the same problem with binaries as TRS-80 users did, so William Davis created a ported Mac version of BinHex in 1984, programmed in BASIC. This then went through a number of versions, and by version 3 it supported the encoding of both the data and resource forks of the original file in a single download file, taking care of a particular Mac issue. The BASIC program was very slow, however. That's when yet another author came in, Yves Lempereur, who implemented an assembly-language version which was much faster. This was labeled 'BinHex 1.0' despite all the earlier BinHex versions that had been written by others.
Binhex For Macbook
So far, all of the BinHexes used the same basic format (though later Mac versions had special coding to deal with resource forks) and the .hex extension, but with version 2.0 a new encoding was introduced which used more characters than the 16 hexadecimal digits of the earlier versions, and hence could encode 6 bits in every (1-byte) character, instead of 4 bits as in the earlier versions. This made the files smaller (though still bigger than the original binaries; this was not a file compression format). Due to this file format being incompatible with the earlier BinHex format, a new extension .hcx was used. However, this version had some problems, since some of the characters chosen for the encoding were problematic when sent by e-mail because different internationalized servers altered some of them in an attempt at localization. BinHex was, by this time, often used for e-mail attachments (mail programs of those days were not yet intelligent enough to apply proper encoding to binary data by themselves as they are now).
To deal with this problem, yet another version was released, called 4.0 because the author belatedly realized that other version numbers including 3.0 had been used for a different author's BinHex. This one used a different set of encoding characters, safer for transmission, and adopted the file extension .hqx which became very popular for Mac binary uploads and e-mail attachments on online services and the Internet. By then CompuServe had improved its protocols to handle raw binary files, so its utility there was lessened, but users still liked the ability to combine data and resource forks in one file (though other methods such as MacBinary were devised for this purpose).
BinHex 5.0 used MacBinary to combine the forks of a file before encoding them in the BinHex characters, but this was not much used. Users either moved to straight MacBinary or stuck with the old, familiar BinHex 4.0, and the latter remained in use well into the 1990s.
Binhex For Macbook Air
Format details
Starting with the move to the .hcx format and continuing with .hqx, the format was no longer actually in hexadecimal despite its name; the encoding, using 64 different characters, is actually very similar to Base64 encoding, though using a different set of characters.
Version 4.0
The BinHex part of the files is encoded as 7-bit ASCII.It starts with the following line of text.Any text before this line is to be ignored.
What follows (after a blank line) is a block of characters from the set:
which are used in that order as the digits of a base-64 representation of the binary data. There are three parts, one after another, the first being a header with file metadata, the second being the data fork, and the third the resource fork. A two-byte CRC checksum is added to each. The entire data block begins and ends with a colon (:). Lines are separated with CR every 64 characters. (This might turn into CR+LF or LF if the file is transferred across diverse systems.)
BinHex 4 uses the RLE90 compression scheme.
Binhex For Macbook Pro
File extension
The most-used version of BinHex uses the .hqx extension as noted above. Seldom-encountered earlier ones used .hex and .hcx. The .hqx extension is rather quirky for 'data archeologists' because it clashes with a different convention, that of files compressed with the Squeeze protocol using file extensions with the middle letter replaced with 'q'. Thus, one would expect a .hqx file to be a .hex file that has been squeezed, but this is wrong. It's just another one of the 'gotchas' that plague people who delve into old computer archives. Just what one would use as a file extension for a .hqx file that's been run through Squeeze remains unknown.
Programs and utilities
- macutil → hexbin
Sample files
- http://cd.textfiles.com/carousel344/MACTOSH/ → LANG/, TECH/, ...
References
Retrieved from 'http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=BinHex&oldid=37967'