They split the product line in two, offering StuffIt Classic in shareware and StuffIt Deluxe as a commercial package. StuffIt soon became very popular and Aladdin Systems was formed to market it (the last shareware release by Lau was version 1.5.1).
By the fall of 1987 StuffIt had largely replaced PackIt in the Mac world, with many software sites even going so far as to convert existing PackIt archives to save more space. Compared to existing utilities on the Mac, notably PackIt, StuffIt offered "one step" operation and higher compression ratios. It combined the fork-combining capabilities of utilities such as MacBinary with newer compression algorithms similar to those used in ZIP. StuffIt was originally developed in the summer of 1987 by Raymond Lau, who was then a student at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.
Raymond Lau (creator), currently Smith Micro SIT!, SITD, SIT2, SIT5 (depending on file version) enc), PC/Unix 8 bit to 7 bit encoding similar to BinHex (.
exe) v1.5.1 to 8.0.x, including encrypted, segmented and self-extracting archive (Classic Mac OS file type code 'SIT!')
Note that the registration reminder dialogue box is not shown in this case. To start StuffIt in Expander mode the following command line switches were used: -expand -uiexpander.
sit and other classic Mac OS-specific archives was 7.02, distributed with StuffIt v7.0.x for Windows.įrom versions 7.5.x to 11 the Expander capabilities were actually performed by the StuffIt Standard Edition, that allowed decompression even after the end of the trial period. The previous stand-alone version able to decompress.
NET v2.0 framework and MSVC 2008 (9.0) runtimes. sitx (and ZIP) archives, version 2009 claims to be able to decompress over 30 formats, some listed below. Unlike the version before it (12.0), which was only able to decompress the newer. The latest stand-alone version for Windows is 2009 (13.0). Expander 5.0 contained many bugs, and its file format was not readable by the earlier version 4.5, leaving Mac users of the time without a viable compression utility. StuffIt has been a target of criticism and dissatisfaction from Mac users in the past as the file format changes frequently, notably during the introduction of StuffIt version 5.0.