Macintosh File System

This article is about the MFS file system. For other Macintosh file systems, see Macintosh file system (disambiguation).
MFS
Developer(s) Apple Computer
Full name Macintosh File System
Introduced January 24, 1984 with System 1
Partition identifier Apple_MFS (Apple Partition Map)
Structures
Directory contents Table
File allocation Linked list
Bad blocks No
Limits
Max. volume size 20 MiB
Max. file size 20 MiB
Max. number of files 4094
Max. filename length 255 characters
Allowed characters in filenames Any Apple codepage (such as MacRoman) character but ":"
Features
Dates recorded Creation, modification
Date range January 1, 1904 - February 6, 2040
Date resolution 1s
Forks Only 2 (data and resource)
Attributes version, locked, type, creator, Finder window, location in Finder window, Finder flags
File system permissions No
Transparent compression No
Transparent encryption No
Other
Supported operating systems System 1 — OS 7.6 (Write), Mac OS 8.0 (Read), OS X (Read with MFSLives)

Macintosh File System (MFS) is a volume format (or disk file system) created by Apple Computer for storing files on 400K floppy disks. MFS was introduced with the original Apple Macintosh computer in January 1984.

MFS was notable both for introducing resource forks to allow storage of structured data, and for storing metadata needed to support the graphical user interface of Mac OS. MFS allows file names to be up to 255 characters in length, although Finder does not allow users to create names longer than 63 characters (31 characters in later versions). MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.

Folders existed as a concept on the original MFS-based Macintosh, but worked completely differently from the way they do on modern systems. They were visible in Finder windows, but not in the open and save dialog boxes. There was always one empty folder on the volume, and if it was altered in any way (such as by adding or renaming files), a new Empty Folder would appear, thus providing a way to create new folders. MFS stored all of the file and directory listing information in a single file. The Finder created the illusion of folders, by storing all files as a directory handle/file handle pair. To display the contents of a particular folder, MFS would scan the directory for all files in that handle. There was no need to find a separate file containing the directory listing.

The Macintosh File System did not support volumes over 20 mebibytes in size, or about 1,400 files. While this is small by today's standards, at the time it seemed very expansive when compared to the Macintosh's then-400 kibibyte floppy drive.

Apple introduced Hierarchical File System as a replacement for MFS in September 1985. In Mac OS 7.6.1, Apple removed support for writing to MFS volumes,[1] and in Mac OS 8.0 support for MFS volumes was removed altogether. Although OS X has no built-in support for MFS, an example VFS plug-in from Apple called MFSLives provides read-only access to MFS volumes.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Technical Notes". Developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2013-09-16.

Bibliography

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, June 13, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.