Series: C Programming on System 6

Hello, cyberpals. In October 2020, I started recording videos of my development of an IMAP client written on my Mac 512Ke (later upgraded to a Mac Plus motherboard with 4 MB of RAM) running System 6, using the THINK C 5 IDE.

These days I'm developing other software, but with the same setup: an 8Mhz system with a 1-bit, 512x342 screen, a one-button mouse, a keyboard with no arrow keys, and an editor with one level of undo and no syntax highlighting. Let's see what we can build with it!

Software

I've released some software that I've developed on my Macintosh Plus. All software is freely released under the terms of the ISC license and contain original source code.

Videos

This list of videos is in reverse chronological order. To be notified of new videos as I publish them, you can subscribe to my RSS feed. There is also a #cyberpals IRC channel on Libera Chat where I and some other interested parties are discussing development on old Macs.


Talking to the Modem

2022-03-05
Starting work on adding a serial module to join the console and telnet inputs, to allow calls through a modem. I got stuck for a while trying to figure out why writes to the serial port would hang the machine.

Video: Q&A

2022-01-14
I tweeted asking if anyone would be interested in a Q&A, and to my surprise, I got many Qs to A.

User Authentication and Telnet Negotiation

2021-12-10
I review some recent commits covering user authentication and telnet negotiation, then write some ANSI output code and a broken function for returning a number’s ordinal suffix.

Amend Revision Control System

2021-10-22
It’s been almost a year since my last confessional video. A few weeks ago I started working on a small revision control system to handle my C projects developed on my Mac and it’s now at the point where I can at least manage commits to the tool itself.

SOCKS5 Support

2020-11-12
Returning to the development of my IMAP client, I add SOCKS5 support to be able to connect through a network proxy, particularly the one I made that is able to convert TLS-encrypted data from my real mailserver into plaintext that the Mac’s slow CPU can support.

Adding a GUI to diff(1)

2020-11-04
In the previous episode I quickly ported OpenBSD’s diff(1) but there wasn’t any interface to select files or scroll through the output. I’ve since added a proper GUI with the ability to select files or folders, and in this episode I walk through the GUI and filesystem code and then add a proper Edit menu. I also make a formal release of the code and binary available for download.

Porting OpenBSD's diff(1)

2020-10-28
I’ve wanted a simple revision control system on my Mac since starting development of my IMAP client. Porting a large system like Git or even CVS would be overkill (and very slow), but maybe something small like OpenBSD’s RCS implementation would suffice. For now, just having a diff utility would be helpful so in this video I port the guts of OpenBSD’s diff(1) and show it generating a unified diff between revisions of a C file.

Message Flags

2020-10-27
In this episode, I fetch the flags of each message and for unseen messages, make them appear in the list in bold. That introduces an off-by-one which I run out of time to fix while recording.

Viewing Messages

2020-10-21
Today, I implement plaintext message viewing and hook it up to the message list. I also review a cleanup of int variables to make them either short or long throughout the project.

Parsing RFC822 Dates

2020-10-16
I wrote a utility function to parse RFC822 dates/times sent by the IMAP server, which then converts them to a UTC time. In this video, I hook it into the IMAP parser and add a resource string for the local timezone offset setting, so these UTC times can then be converted to a local time and displayed in the message list.

Easier LDEFs With This One Weird Trick

2020-10-14
I recently read about using a jump instruction as an LDEF resource to allow keeping the list definition function in the main program executable/project, so in this video I implement the technique for the message list.

Message List Fixes

2020-10-12
In this video, I get the list of messages displaying again and fix a bug that occurred when closing a mailbox. I provide a quick summary of creating LDEF procedures in THINK C for drawing custom list cells, which I will expand upon on in a future video.

IMAP Protocol Parser Fixes

2020-10-10
In this episode, I fix the off-by-one error in the IMAP envelope parser noted in the previous episode, then improve the tracking of a malloced buffer that gets shifted around during parsing.

Debugging a Crash

2020-10-08
Returning to the development of my IMAP client, in this video I add functionality to fetch the default mailbox name from the resource file (later to be moved to a preferences window) and then eventually locate a crash in the IMAP protocol parser from a bogus memmove.

Demo Application

2020-10-05
In this video, I create a new GUI application from scratch, create a resource file and add an image to it, and then display that image in a window. I also cover using THINK C’s debugger to inspect a struct. Then, my Mac dies.

Intro

2020-10-01
I’ve been writing an IMAP client for and on my Mac 512Ke over the past many weeks. Taking inspiration from Andreas Kling’s excellent YouTube videos documenting his development of the Serenity operating system, I thought I’d start screencasting some of my work.