Quote:
Originally posted by stomachmonkey
The "incompatabilities" issue was directly related to the way the OS's handled files.
With PC's you had the old 8.3 limitation, a file name could not be longer than 8 characters and had a 3 character extension that identified what program it belonged to.
With Macs you had 2 parts to a every file, a data fork that was the actual data. and a resource fork that contained the icon and info to tell the OS what app to use.
So you had 2 issues, Mac users were using longer filenames and never appended a file extension. So when it went to the PC it lost the resource fork and had no extension so Windows did not know what to do with it. All anyone had to do was add the proper extension and everything worked fine.
Oddly enough these days Windows hides the extensions by default while OS X adds them to just about everything by default.
So long story short, the incompatabilities were insignificant, most of it was end user related.
Scott
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That's a good explanation. Many apps on the Mac give you the option of appending a file extension. I've been using a Mac almost excusively since January 1984. Since '91 I've made my main Mac a laptop. The exceptions have been a couple of times that I had extended consulting gigs and needed to use an office-provided PC.
I'm now the only Mac user in an office of 11, but within 2 months, a senior programmer and the head of sales are both converting to Macs. The impaired productivity of a malware-prone platform has finally gotten to them.
Further, our 'groupware' now is all moved to Google apps.
One other thing, now that I think about it: when people in our office have files they aren't sure of -- trust or origin -- they bring them to me, because there is no risk to my platform in opening them.