[makomk]

No, the problem is that there were all kinds of interesting non-Unixy implementations of files out there and they were all incompatible with each other. For example, VMS supported file versioning and record-based files, neither of which Macs supported, but in turn had no way of supporting resource forks. Similarly, NTFS supports alternate data streams which can store a resource fork, but Mac Classic had no way of storing other alternate data streams. The Internet forced everyone to use Unix's idea of files because it's the only subset of functionality that actually worked between more than one platform.