I don’t think people these days realize how interesting pre-X pre-UNIXification MacOS Classic was.
Single files often were made of multiple data streams “resource forks”, and this was actually utilized heavily (NTFS has a similar concept but it’s almost never used). Files had “creator codes” as metadata rather than file extensions. They were directly and firmly associated with the application that created them rather than a description of their content.
Files in and of themselves were a very different concept in MacOS Classic.
In my eyes a big part of what killed this was the Internet. To the Internet, a file is clearly only a single stream of data. Files are typed by content via mime and file extension, not what created it. Anything with resource forks need to be bundled in a .sit file. This is clearly inconvenient, and made MacOS files second-class citizens.
Mind you, resource fork still exist in macOS today, they’re just used for custom icons, tags and file comments. Metadata. Nothing to the extent that MacOS Classic used them for, and all things users don’t mind losing on uploading to the web.
- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/articles/152-what-is-a-s...
Single files often were made of multiple data streams “resource forks”, and this was actually utilized heavily (NTFS has a similar concept but it’s almost never used). Files had “creator codes” as metadata rather than file extensions. They were directly and firmly associated with the application that created them rather than a description of their content.
Files in and of themselves were a very different concept in MacOS Classic.
In my eyes a big part of what killed this was the Internet. To the Internet, a file is clearly only a single stream of data. Files are typed by content via mime and file extension, not what created it. Anything with resource forks need to be bundled in a .sit file. This is clearly inconvenient, and made MacOS files second-class citizens.
Mind you, resource fork still exist in macOS today, they’re just used for custom icons, tags and file comments. Metadata. Nothing to the extent that MacOS Classic used them for, and all things users don’t mind losing on uploading to the web.
- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/articles/152-what-is-a-s...