userbinator parent
I've noticed that Mac OS 9 along with some of the other OSs/platforms that disappeared into obolescence have one thing in common: a filesystem that has a more fancy abstraction that just "stream of bytes". The resource fork/data fork system of classic Mac OS is an extra hurdle to sharing files with other systems which don't have such distinctions. It was technically superior in some ways, but also restrictive in others (one of my first experiences with it was "what do you mean I can't open any file in the text editor to see the bytes?") and I suspect the latter may have contributed to its demise, because the opaqueness was not conducive to creating a culture of power users and "semi-developers" unlike the PCs of the time. Early Macs were an even more isolated ecosystem than the ones today.
> …the opaqueness was not conducive to creating a culture of power users and "semi-developers" unlike the PCs of the time.
Utter nonsense, as anyone who has ever used ResEdit can tell.
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
Also, extended file attributes are alive and well.
...so you have to go get additional software in order to do that, instead of being able to use what comes with the OS? That's already going to turn off a bunch of users.
In those days, PC users were entering Asm code published in magazines into DEBUG (which came with MS-DOS), creating real application binaries.