CiderPress History
The true origin of CiderPress is a program called "NuView", the NuFX Archive Viewer. Written in May 1989, it printed a list of files from a ShrinkIt archive. This was also of note because it's the first useful program (i.e. not a class project) I ever wrote in the C programming language.
This project gradually evolved into a program called "NuLib", which continued to grow until 1992. In 1998 I started working on a NuFX archive manipulation library, called NufxLib. That was a back-burner project until it was finally released with the NuLib2 archiver in May 2000.
In December 2002 I decided to start working on Windows software. The original CiderPress was introduced in March 2003 as a shareware application. It was originally intended as "ShrinkIt for Windows", a simple GUI wrapper around the NufxLib library, but during the early stages of development support for read-only access to disk images was added.
In October 2004, CiderPress v2.0 was released. It added the ability to create and modify disk images, and allowed direct access to physical media.
Four years after its initial release, in March 2007, the program was re-released as free open-source software. In January 2015, the code base was updated for modern systems, but at its heart it was still a Windows 98/2K 32-bit application.
Work on CiderPress II began in May 2022, mostly out of frustration with the awkwardness of the user interface of the original. Another goal was to have a full set of features available from the command line, including file converters. The original CiderPress had a few sample commands that ran under Linux, but nothing actually useful.
The first public announcement was made a year later, in May 2023, at a point where the CLI was in good shape but the GUI was barely functional. Several months later, near the end of 2023, an alpha-quality build was released for general testing.
Depending on how you figure things, this might be the 5th time I've written the same project. It just gets a bit larger and broader in scope each time.
