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A comment on Dotfile madness. Parent comment

Re:Dotfile madness by kazinator on Saturday February 02, 2019 @12:26PM (#19064258)
Apple's Macintosh did this in 1984. Files were tagged with 32 bit codes: one for the "creator" (the associated app) and one for the type. These were often made up out of readable characters: a so called "fourcc" (four character code). The "fourcc" persists in cross-platform media formats.
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Re:Dotfile madness by mistercow on Saturday February 02, 2019 @08:20PM (#19067127)
The first software I ever sold online was an app that would change the creator code of a file to whatever application you wanted. For some reason, there was no obvious built-in way to do that in Mac OS 8 (besides opening the document in the other application and saving it, or changing it in ResEdit).

I only ever sold one license, but I was 12, so I was pretty excited.

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Re:Dotfile madness by OJFord on Sunday February 03, 2019 @08:23AM (#19069434)
If that can be done, doesn't it defeat the purpose here? Anything can create a file, and then change this tag to 'system' or whatever.
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Re:Dotfile madness by loeg on Sunday February 03, 2019 @05:23PM (#19072622)
Mac OS 8 dates to the 90s. Nowadays these things are probably public key signed, but back then they probably were not.
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Re:Dotfile madness by mistercow on Sunday February 03, 2019 @10:29PM (#19073776)
Back then, public key signing of any strength was considered a munition.
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Re:Dotfile madness by mistercow on Sunday February 03, 2019 @05:16PM (#19072592)
But why would they?
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