[GTALUG] Anyone on the list know what I need to read ancient Apple disks?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 11:12:18PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> That sounds like the most, uh, powerful option.  There probably would
> be no need to reverse engineer MacOS9 applications' expressive but
> quirky file structures.
> 
> BTW: the resource fork / data fork thing in original MacOS seems odd to
> we UNIX-types who think that a file is a bucket of bytes.  But MacOS
> got a lot of leverage out of that thing.  "ResEdit" was a wonder to
> behold.  Essentially: the greatest common denominator for files in
> MacOS was much higher than in UNIX so generic tools could do much
> more.
> 
> What MacOS could do on a machine with 128k of RAM (including the video
> frame buffer) puts all mainstream GUI systems to shame.  Part of this
> was accomplished by using shared representations, some of which lived
> in the resource fork.

Also putting the entire OS in ROM saves an awful lot of RAM.

> That being said, I wish Linux didn't support forks.  They make the
> file abstraction more complicated with very little benefit or use.
> The main benefit, as I understand it, is to embrace and extend NTFS.

Linux supports resource forks in filesystems?

-- 
MLen Sorensen