Actually, resource forks go all the way back to the origins of classic MacOS circa 1984-85! And they were a <i>lot</i> more than just extended attributes -- they were a b-tree storage abstraction full of stuff like icons, chunks of 68K machine code, and anything else that simply didn&#x27;t belong in a linear data file.<p>It&#x27;s a hold-over from MacOS&#x27;s very non-UNIX origins, and had the makings of an OO filesystem back in the day -- but then the adoption of NeXTStep -- er, sorry, OSX -- obsoleted it overnight. And now it&#x27;s basically the veriform appendix of OSX, and leads newbies to jump to this rather odd conclusion (that it&#x27;s somehow &quot;crazy&quot; to do something in a fundmentally non-UNIXy way).