At 06:38 PM 6/9/98 PDT, Max Eskin wrote:
>
>I was wondering what the point was of the resource fork, who invented
>it, how it's better than a simple bunch of characters, and why they
>didn't think that 20 years later we'd be ripping our hair out because of
it...
Aye, now there's a good question. File formats are my life, or at
least this first half of my life, so that question interests me.
Even the Mac or its apps seemed to be confused about the nature of
what should be in the resource fork - some apps stored all their
data there, using it as a sort of mini-database of tagged chunks
of data. If there's anything classic about today's computers,
it's the nearly universal recognition that a file's a file.
Departures from this are interesting but rare.
The other non-file info such as the filename itself, the date stamp,
attributes, etc. are treated in an incidental fashion. The Amiga
file system, for example, had a "file comment" of about 80 characters
of extra text to describe the file that wasn't always preserved.
This may have been inherited from Tripos.
And then there's the way something like the effects of Radix-50
(packing three chars into two bytes) has percolated through the
years as three-character filename extensions from RT-11 (or
earlier?) to CP/M to DOS and Windows, which are overused and
abused in many ways.
One of my latest three-great-ideas-before-breakfast ideas is
to write a program for Windows that sniffs and identifies files
in the manner of Unix's "file". That's the problem with files as
files: you can easily lose track of what's in them, especially
if you lose that three-char extension, or it gets wrapped in
an archive format or attachment, etc.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <
http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
Received on Wed Jun 10 1998 - 09:29:00 BST