16 Mar
2007
16 Mar
'07
10:46 a.m.
At 09:20 AM 3/16/2007, Jules Richardson wrote:
[1] Compulsory "vintage" question - what
filesystem / platform was the first to allow arbitrary metadata to be included at the
actual file level?
One milestone is the original Mac OS file system. Their files were
"forked". There was a data fork and a resource fork, with the
data fork holding an arbitrary bunch of bytes in the traditional
sense, and the data fork was a tagged database-like table of
other structured records of metadata info like the type of
file, its creating application, icon image, localization, etc.
Some OS files like fonts and executables put everything in the
resource fork. Some third-party apps did the same. In these
cases, the data fork was empty and the entire data of the
file per se was in the resource fork.
A more detailed discussion, including details of how more
recent versions of OS X have expanded Unix tools like 'cp'
and 'mv' to respect resource forks, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork
- John