[blakeyrat]

On Mac Classic, if you wanted to ship a custom font with your application, you'd put it in the Resource fork in a resource of "FONT" type.

So why wouldn't a stand-alone font file consist of a Resource fork with a single resource of "FONT" type? Otherwise, the OS engineers have to develop two entirely different ways of reading in font data. Why duplicate the effort?

The system made perfect sense, both then and now. It bothers me that so few people know anything about Mac Classic, it really was an amazingly well-designed OS for its time.

[mbell]

> an amazingly well-designed OS for its time

It had a few interesting ideas. But no desktop OS based on cooperative multitasking can be called 'well-designed', almost anything could hard-lock the entire system at any time.

[icedchai]

AmigaOS was a lot better designed and had full preemptive multitasking, etc. Too bad Commodore sucked at marketing.

[blakeyrat]

Considering it was built for a 68000, I believe that was a reasonable decision on Apple's part.

[mappu]

>On Mac Classic, if you wanted to ship a custom font with your application, you'd put it in the Resource fork in a resource of "FONT" type.

On Windows you can do the same thing with .rsrc in an .exe/.dll file.

It's possible you would ship a font as a PE .dll with a font resource, but for a single file the encapsulation is a little unnecessary (unless your application architecture already makes it easy to deal with PE encapsulation).

[Avernar]

Except that in the windows example you gave the .rsrc section is part of the main data stream. It is counted in the file's size when doing a dir command. When the file is copied by all command line and shell tools or sent over the internet the data in the .rsrc section is copied/sent just like all the other data in the exe/dll.

None of this is true for the resource fork in the Mac case.

[itomato]

Had you been there, you might think different.

[stefantalpalaru]

It does not strike me as a sane design. You already have file extensions, unique prefixes (like those used by the 'file' command to identify files). Why would you use fs forks to differentiate between file types?

[ascorbic]

Mac OS Classic had no file extensions. I remember they felt like such a hack when switching to OS X, compared to the flexibility of resource forks.

[amyjess]

Actually, Classic Mac OS used type and creator codes, which were attributes on files, to identify filetypes, not resources.

[stefantalpalaru]

That makes more sense.