Comments | tmaher: for <strong class="lj-user"><a href="/read/user/furr_a_bruin">furr_a

tmaher

for furr_a_bruin

Dec 17, 2008 17:20

http://osxbook.com/software/ancientfs/Read more... )

Comments 5

keanubear December 18 2008, 04:47:28 UTC

So cool!!! (did that sound like i understood what this was?)

tmaher December 18 2008, 04:58:30 UTC

So, like, imagine you had a unix computer from 1979, and you wanted to get the data off of its disk drives. Or you wanted to read its tape backups.

This would help you read that data on a contemporary Mac. There are a couple of caveats, but that's basically it.

keanubear December 18 2008, 04:59:20 UTC

That is cool!

furr_a_bruin December 18 2008, 05:28:34 UTC

That IS cool - but you're right in thinking I would find it vastly cooler if there were implementations for OFS, FFS, PFS and so on from the Amiga... which of course had the ability to use all sorts of "alien" filesystems built in. *grin*

You know what I miss from the Amiga filesystems? File comments, and apps that use them intelligently. One of the things I loved about web browsing on the Amiga is that ALL the web browsers would save the source URL as a comment any time I saved an image or linked file. There was never any moments of "Damn, where the hell did I get THIS from?!"

zml December 18 2008, 15:37:23 UTC

Everything old is new again. Most file systems these days support some notion of alternate data streams, extended attributes, or forks (blech). I know that the Explorer in Windows actually makes use of ADS to tag random crap on files, I wouldn't be surprised if it noted the URL. I only know this because our CIFS server has to deal with that crap, and Explorer is an easy way to tickle it in Windows. :)