Disk Tools System Software

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Revision as of 19:01, 30 March 2023 by Huntertur (talk | contribs) (→‎Actual version: Add note about timing)
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The Disk Tools System Software clearly has some special things with it. For one, if you copy it to a hard disk and boot from it, you get a warning about this System Software not being meant for anything but booting from a floppy disk. Additionally, the System file appears to be missing a lot of important stuff that lets you run applications without half of them crashing for strange reasons.

Actual version

I always thought it was weird that the Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1 Disk Tools disks didn't seem to have any of the OS 8 enhancements, such as the multithreaded Finder, yet showed 8.0 and 8.1 in their versions. I fed the System file for Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools 2 through ResEdit, opened the DSAT ID = 0 resource, and discovered at 0x24C the string "System 7.5.3 needs more memory to start up." Additionally, the vers ID = 1 resource for Finder states the version as 7.5.6DT, even though the last release of the 7.5.x series was 7.5.5. Perhaps Apple decided that the minimum set of 7.6 was too large for a floppy disk, yet didn't need the updates from 7.5.5, so froze System at 7.5.3, yet kept the 7.5.x Finder up-to-date with bug fixes and forked the codebase to add more to create 7.5.6DT?

Note that the timestamp for the Finder from Mac OS 7.6.1 (Finder version 7.5.6, 515019 bytes) is 1996-12-17, which is before the release of Mac OS 7.6 but after System 7.5.5.

  • Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools 2 System: created/modified 1997-06-12 12:00:00 PM, 578024 bytes
  • Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools 2 Finder: created/modified 1996-11-26 12:00:00 PM, 388694 bytes
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