Rescuing Files From Classic Mac OS...with Swift! // -dealloc
My winter break project was getting the files off an old PowerBook from the 90s (my dad’s old work computer) that I’ve had lying around for a while. (There’s probably not anything of interest there to anyone but our family, but who knows?) I’ve looked at this before, but it’s hard to get a 25-year-old computer to talk to a modern OS. I can’t compress or image the whole disk because it’s already mostly full. “Standard” file sharing protocols fall short because Classic Mac OS files are a little more complicated than just a stream of data. And I don’t want to mess with the system too much, because it’s old and I don’t want the hard disk to suddenly fail or whatever.
So I decided to just write a dead-simple one-off file transfer program that throws data over a TCP connection. I haven’t even written the decoder yet for this ad-hoc archive format; I’ve just netcat-ed the whole stream into files to look at later. But the most fun part is that some of my past work is paying off: I’m writing this in Swift, a modern language running on a decades-old OS.
I’ve named the project “Krypton” because it is about getting something off a doomed substrate, and I guess that makes the archive format a “krypt”.
