Way back in 2019, the Computer History Museum released the source code in C for Qualcomm Eudora 6 for Mac. If you don't already know, the two different e-Mail clients called Eudora had and still have a devout userbase. So devout, in fact, that they've been running the original app for Mac in emulation ever since 2011.
(A note on the historical context: The original Eudora software—that is, this one—was educational software for the Mac, made by a team at UIUC. Qualcomm needed a solution for their internal mail system, bought the rights, and tasked a different team with writing a similar app for Windows from scratch, which they also named Eudora. From 1988 to 1998, both apps were essentially synonymous with personal eMail—as distinct from dialling into some mainframe in Carjackistan and doing all your work there—and the Windows version is still competitive with the current players on the POP3/IMAP scene, although it had to be renamed for legal reasons.)
Anyway, I had plans to get some people together, make a few minor updates to the source in order to remove "profiling" (Qualcomm's euphemism for their crippleware/adware options), change the name of the app to Eos, and re-release it as a Carbon app for Intel Mac. Unlike the (totally unrelated) Windows app, Eudora for Mac is a low-effort project in mint condition, without unsatisfied external dependencies.
Yes, on the link above, Len Shustek claims "The Macintosh version, because it is based on an older processor and operating system, would be harder to resuscitate. It would have to be substantially rewritten for the current Mac environment. But not much is beyond the capability of motivated and clever programmers. Have at it." - I can confidently say this is hogwash, and that the existing code is perfectly capable of being compiled as-is with Xcode... or at least, it is now, after a glaring problem was fixed. The Windows version, on the other hand, must have taken ten years off my life, considering it was only 75% complete and relied on a very expensive, proprietary UI toolkit.
Rewind back to 2019. On close inspection, it turned out that the codebase had been incompetently archived, my point of contact washed his hands of the matter, etc. etc., and essentially I was forced to move on to gr€€ner and fr€$her pa$ture$. Quite simply, with a complex and large-scale project such as this, if it's got a missing part big enough, re-building that missing part is simply not feasible.
On the other hand, if the part is found, that's a whole different story. This is exactly what happened last November. The part in question is the resources for the whole app: graphical assets, string tables, the works. Originally, they were in the source tree as .rsrc files (i.e., compiled by Rez), and had a length of 0 bytes when the project landed on my desk; right now, there's a .r file in the root directory called all-resources.r that contains all the resources as Rez source.
I'm not a programmer, least of all in C (I've written some toy programs in Lisp, and that's also what I use to configure my editor of choice, but that won't help me here). I've therefore set up a repository on GitHub with the hope of finding someone to work on the project with me, and I propose we communicate on Signal instant messenger via this link.
The one stumbling block, other than the little episode with the missing resources (which has now been dealt with), is that this app was developed on CodeWarrior IDE originally, so the workspace file is in CW format rather than Xcode—but Xcode can import Codewarrior projects.
Also, because I've been told this by multiple people—that this app won't run on a new(er) Mac system, one that's running Catalina for example, and certainly not an Apple Silicon Mac, is a fact of which I'm keenly aware. Be that as it may, virtualising Mojave on a Mavericks system is far more convenient than emulating Lion on that same Mavericks system.
Anyway, don't be afraid to drop me a line. This project is near and dear to my heart as well as the 2,000+ people who still use Eudora in emulation on the Mac.
(A note on the historical context: The original Eudora software—that is, this one—was educational software for the Mac, made by a team at UIUC. Qualcomm needed a solution for their internal mail system, bought the rights, and tasked a different team with writing a similar app for Windows from scratch, which they also named Eudora. From 1988 to 1998, both apps were essentially synonymous with personal eMail—as distinct from dialling into some mainframe in Carjackistan and doing all your work there—and the Windows version is still competitive with the current players on the POP3/IMAP scene, although it had to be renamed for legal reasons.)
Anyway, I had plans to get some people together, make a few minor updates to the source in order to remove "profiling" (Qualcomm's euphemism for their crippleware/adware options), change the name of the app to Eos, and re-release it as a Carbon app for Intel Mac. Unlike the (totally unrelated) Windows app, Eudora for Mac is a low-effort project in mint condition, without unsatisfied external dependencies.
Yes, on the link above, Len Shustek claims "The Macintosh version, because it is based on an older processor and operating system, would be harder to resuscitate. It would have to be substantially rewritten for the current Mac environment. But not much is beyond the capability of motivated and clever programmers. Have at it." - I can confidently say this is hogwash, and that the existing code is perfectly capable of being compiled as-is with Xcode... or at least, it is now, after a glaring problem was fixed. The Windows version, on the other hand, must have taken ten years off my life, considering it was only 75% complete and relied on a very expensive, proprietary UI toolkit.
Rewind back to 2019. On close inspection, it turned out that the codebase had been incompetently archived, my point of contact washed his hands of the matter, etc. etc., and essentially I was forced to move on to gr€€ner and fr€$her pa$ture$. Quite simply, with a complex and large-scale project such as this, if it's got a missing part big enough, re-building that missing part is simply not feasible.
On the other hand, if the part is found, that's a whole different story. This is exactly what happened last November. The part in question is the resources for the whole app: graphical assets, string tables, the works. Originally, they were in the source tree as .rsrc files (i.e., compiled by Rez), and had a length of 0 bytes when the project landed on my desk; right now, there's a .r file in the root directory called all-resources.r that contains all the resources as Rez source.
I'm not a programmer, least of all in C (I've written some toy programs in Lisp, and that's also what I use to configure my editor of choice, but that won't help me here). I've therefore set up a repository on GitHub with the hope of finding someone to work on the project with me, and I propose we communicate on Signal instant messenger via this link.
The one stumbling block, other than the little episode with the missing resources (which has now been dealt with), is that this app was developed on CodeWarrior IDE originally, so the workspace file is in CW format rather than Xcode—but Xcode can import Codewarrior projects.
Also, because I've been told this by multiple people—that this app won't run on a new(er) Mac system, one that's running Catalina for example, and certainly not an Apple Silicon Mac, is a fact of which I'm keenly aware. Be that as it may, virtualising Mojave on a Mavericks system is far more convenient than emulating Lion on that same Mavericks system.
Anyway, don't be afraid to drop me a line. This project is near and dear to my heart as well as the 2,000+ people who still use Eudora in emulation on the Mac.
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