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On one hand, it was easy to overlook this issue, and you'd end up with catastrophic data loss (been there, done that). On the other hand: 1. it's the sort of mistake you tend to learn quickly not to redo ;( 2. a variety of encoding schemes were pretty common, and usually integrated in Mac browsers, mail clients, ftp clients. See for example this page from the Fetch website (http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/help/Contents/Concepts/Uploa...), or the hexbin(1) man page. My personal take on what killed MacOS is this. The MacOS was, for the start, a clever pile of kludges, for 68K series CPUs. Hot patching of routines was how you fixed bugs, introduced support for new hardware, etc. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Toolbox#Advent_and_i...) (Btw, a System 7.1 source code archive leaked years ago.) I can imagine debugging and extending it became more and more painful. And core data structure choices (16-bit-friendly) might have been becoming wasteful as architectures came and went... So Apple had people grinding at Copland (apparently didn't quite make it), and then NeXT was bought, . TL;DR: IMHO, that's not the main point (not either a notable one, once you're educated about it). MacOS grew to a point where it became a fragile, quite complex, house of cards. |