Re: Netscape 4.0 press release at their server

Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
> 
> >Wait a minute, I think you will find that Acorn RISCOS has a perfectly
> >good system of file types. And they have a similar profile in my country
> >to that which Apple has in yours.
> 
> Didn't Acorn decide to migrate to PowerPC's running MacOS?

No.  Acorn restructured last year to get the technology development
seperated from any education business by forming a jointly owned
venture with Apple called Xemplar (www.xemplar.co.uk).   Acorn RISC
Technologies (www.art.acorn.co.uk) is now providing all kinds of design
and implementation services based on RISC provessors (primarily ARM)

> The difference is that Apple *registers* creator type (parent application)
> and file type codes. This prevents Word/FrameMaker and similar conflicts.
> Of course, another difference is that the 4-byte codes are *binary*,
> resulting in 4 billion possible codes. I've even reserved a few for my own
> MacOS programs! ;-)

The lack of filetypes has been a concern for some time in the Acorn world
where we have only 4096 types.  Again these are registered in a single
place, but according to the people running the registry, there is no
shortage ...

So is it necessary to have all these different filetypes?  Does it lead to
file-type bloat with lots of different types for what are essentially the
same format files?



[Not related to or speaking for Acorn Computer Group in any way, except as
a user of a StrongARM-powered Risc PC which seems to outperform our P166's
running NT4 with no trouble]

-- 
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/      http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 05:09:46 UTC