On Mar 8, 2018, at 11:58 AM, Ethan O'Toole via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format. You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing. You could copy an archive file or binary to a MAC via whatever means and it just showed up as an unusable blob without other utilities to change some thing about it so it could execute or so the archive programs could unarchive it.
The resource fork is actually a really great concept, but it wasn't very transferrable to file systems (such as FAT) which have no concept of a file with multiple partitions. Interestingly enough, NTFS supports multiple named forks, and most POSIX filesystems support the concept of "extended attributes" (xattrs) which are the same thing. Apple was just ahead of its time... *ducks* In Mac OS X, they've pretty much deprecated resource forks (though they still work just fine) in favor of the NeXT-inspired approach of "bundles", which is just putting everything into a directory that gets treated like a single file. For example, all OS X applications (.app bundles) are just folders full of resource files, metadata and the actual application executables. It's a lot more transportable over foreign filesystems, which I suspect was part of the reason for going that way, but it preserves a lot of what was great about the Mac's Resource Fork. - Dave