Files as files

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>