On 15 Sep 2015, at 1:16pm, John McKown <john.archie.mckown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Like the "resource fork" on the older MacOS systems? I think that OS/2 also > has "extended attributes"(?) which could be set. > <quote from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes Resource forks were intended for content rather than meta-data. But the Mac always had the Creator/Type system that was mentioned earlier in the thread. They were each four characters long, so you'd have a Creator/type of ttxt/text = a text file created by 'TeachText' (equivalent of NOTEPAD) mpnt/jpeg = an image file in JPEG format created by MacPaint CDrw/jpeg = an image file in JPEG format created by Corel Draw etc.. The creator told the operating system which application should be launched by default to open the file. The type told all applications what they'd find if they opened the file, and using that they could decide whether they should be opening the file at all. The filename was completely ignored by the original MacOS. It paid attention only to those settings. They weren't part of the filename and you needed to run a little utility to change them, which meant that the sort of users who would mess things up by changing a file extension were not able to mess them up. It was an excellent system, far better than just having a three character file extension. Simon.
