StuffIt

» see stuffit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

stuffit got its end of life notice in december 2019. smith micro put up a single support article and that was the end of the consumer roadmap. a final universal binary update arrived in december 2020 to cover apple silicon, which mostly felt like a courtesy. after that, nothing.

the program was written in summer 1987 by raymond lau, then a teenager at stuyvesant high school in new york. it glued together what the mac needed in one tool: fork-aware archiving plus compression, shipped as shareware, replacing the earlier packit. by fall 1987 the.sit extension had won mind share on macs and packit was on its way out.

aladdin systems formed around the product to sell it commercially through the 1990s. imsi bought aladdin in 2004 and rebranded it allume, then smith micro absorbed allume the next year. the stuffit x format came in september 2002 with deluxe 7.0, designed to extend the original scheme with unicode names and unix attributes. most releases after that were incremental upkeep against macos changes more than reinvention.

i was on windows in the 33.6k modem years, so my exposure to.sit was indirect. an old mac shareware page would link a.sit and the windows side had to fish out stuffit expander for windows to open it. compression on my desktop was winzip. mac compression as a whole canon is something i mostly know about from forum posts and screenshots, not from my own taskbar.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

on the mac,.sit was just the extension you saw at the end of every download for fifteen years. info-mac mirrors, the macintosh garden, mac ftp archives, every one of them shipped sit files. stuffit expander was free and the deluxe paid version was what you installed if you wanted to make new archives or pull out the older binhex hqx files.

~ what apple did to it ~

apple stopped giving stuffit shelter once mac os x introduced disk images and zip support natively. by the tiger and leopard era you did not need stuffit to open most downloads anymore..sit slowly became a legacy format for older mac shareware archives. macos catalina in 2019 dropped native.sit reading entirely, the same calendar year smith micro published the end of life notice.

~ the long tail ~

the format still survives through the unar tool and a few open archive emulators. you can still open a 1991.sit if you go looking for the right binary. the brand itself stopped having any reason to exist once the mac platform stopped recognizing it on first click. the deluxe app got delisted from the mac app store. the support page is now one paragraph long.

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