[Openmcl-devel] The original CCL

[Chris Hanson]

On Jun 22, 2016, at 10:39 AM, mikel evins <mevins at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Jun 22, 2016, at 12:33 PM, Gary Byers <gb at clozure.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Digitool used some Apple vcs that was
>> (somehow) accessible over the net
> 
> I think that was Projector. I don't know if Apple still uses it. They used to sort of keep everything forever, but they also used to not be very enthusiastic about helping people outside the company get their hands on it.

Projector was a supported part of Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, and even split out into its own separate component that could be interacted with via AppleEvents from an IDE or other environment (SourceServer). So we actually did want people to use it, and plenty did. :)

Projector used database files on a file server, in conjunction with byte range locking, to manage shared access. Since virtually everyone who used it hosted it using either Personal File Sharing or AppleShare, that worked just fine and it didn't have the same problems as Visual SourceSafe despite operating in a similar fashion. I expect for Internet use, you just mounted the share over IP, which was supported starting in the mid-late-1990s first from AppleShare and then from Personal File Sharing.

If you have a Projector database you want to extract information from, you can just take a classic Mac or emulator, install MPW, and put the Projector database hierarchy on the local HFS filesystem. Then there are MPW commands that'll let you extract all of the branches, versions, comments, etc. (Which could then be massaged into a git fast-import stream.)

If you wanted to recover everything from a Projector database hierarchy on a modern system, the documentation for the Projector archive file format was published in PDF back in the late 1990s. I found it on one of my Developer CD Series discs a few months ago, when someone else was asking around about how to recover old code from a Projector database…

  -- Chris
  -- who works on dev tools at Apple these days but didn't then