On one hand, it was easy to overlook this issue, and you&#x27;d end up with catastrophic data loss (been there, done that).<p>On the other hand:<p>1. it&#x27;s the sort of mistake you tend to learn quickly not to redo ;(<p>2. a variety of encoding schemes were pretty common, and usually integrated in Mac browsers, mail clients, ftp clients. See for example this page from the Fetch website (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fetchsoftworks.com&#x2F;fetch&#x2F;help&#x2F;Contents&#x2F;Concepts&#x2F;UploadFormats.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fetchsoftworks.com&#x2F;fetch&#x2F;help&#x2F;Contents&#x2F;Concepts&#x2F;Uploa...</a>), or the hexbin(1) man page.<p>My personal take on what killed MacOS is this.<p>The MacOS was, for the start, a clever pile of kludges, for 68K series CPUs. Hot patching of routines was how you fixed bugs, introduced support for new hardware, etc. (See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Macintosh_Toolbox#Advent_and_implementation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Macintosh_Toolbox#Advent_and_i...</a>) (Btw, a System 7.1 source code archive leaked years ago.)<p>I can imagine debugging and extending it became more and more painful. And core data structure choices (16-bit-friendly) might have been becoming wasteful as architectures came and went...<p>So Apple had people grinding at Copland (apparently didn&#x27;t quite make it), and then NeXT was bought, .<p>TL;DR: IMHO, that&#x27;s not the main point (not either a notable one, once you&#x27;re educated about it). MacOS grew to a point where it became a fragile, quite complex, house of cards.