9c845bd6
XPost: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
From: agent1@section31.org
On 1/6/2012 9:57 PM, MuahMan wrote:
> On Jan 6, 4:03 pm, Justin wrote:
>> It's true.
>> Going all the way back to 1985, Electronic Arts came out with the IFF
>> (Interchange File Format) based on Apple's idea/implementation of FourCC
>> - even the IFF spec says Apple thought of it first.
Thia is a bit skewed. IFF was indeed released by EA, but jointly
developed with Commodore for use on the Amiga. The similarity to IFF
files (superficially) was the Macintosh resource fork. The resource
file format has a different basic structure however. One can have many
resources of each type, but requires a unique numeric ID for each.
OTOH, with IFF, you can have as many as you have space for, but you
have to develop your own convention for assigning tags or names to
them. (ie: a good use of the NAME chunk type.) The AIFF FORM can have
a NAME chunk attached to it, so you could scan a file for FORM chunks
containing an AIFF chunk with a given name. The big thing this
implementation lacks is the ability to randomly access specific
resources and edit them without rewriting the whole file. You could
write an IFF library to handle this, but it's just not a standard
feature. Embedding additional tags in data was a popular feature just
like JPEG files containing thumbnails and metadata (camera orientation
or resolution, date/timestamps).
>> Of course the original name was called "OSTypes" once Microsoft saw it,
>> they simply changed the name so they could feign ignorance of its origins.
>> Even today, Microsoft uses the technique to identify files in DirectShow
>> and DirectX. Also... Microsoft's proprietary WMV format is based in this.
>>
>> Is there *anything* Microsoft didn't steal from Apple?
>
> Cancer cells from Steve Jobs?
--
MFB
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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