pouët.net

3-letter file suffixes came about because BBSes used PCs, not Amigas. It's also the cause for not-880KB-split archives since PC could only do 720K.

PCs got the suffixes from 1970s CP/M, because IBM asked Microsoft if they had an OS, they had nothing and lied to IBM and then pirated CP/M.

No OS needs extensions to signify file type. To this day, you see all kinds of 2026 modern security antivirus etc (yada yada) services and programs hanging up on suffixes and not even bothering to check file type. All of these people suck very badly at everything security related and know nothing at all about files.

A real OS signifies its file type by its actual contents. As a result, no files on Amiga needs a file suffix or file type. Now, obviously I'm a great Amiga fan, but all that I have said is also true to a computer scientist.

Unfortunately, CSci is not looked up to since the past 35 years, and what we have now is INSTEAD of perfectly crash free programs and secure software.

Yes, you add any extension (or none) you can think of to an Amiga file, but the first place the OS will look is inside the file header, not the filename. With Windows/MS-DOS, you can change a html document from .htm to .txt and view the source of the html as easily as that, which can be quite handy if you need to look at source code for say .pas into .txt.

If anything, I've found that it's necessary to cut the header from certain files just to make them sendable online, example being:

I like to attach small .rar archives to emails I send to myself, as a form of backup. But while one email client doesn't mind archives as attachments, another one does, so I get a MAILER-DAEMON error when I try to use that one.

What I've done is to rename the .rar archive to .txt AND go into the .txt document with something like Notepad++ (more powerful than bog-standard Windows Notepad) and deliberately delete the "Rar" at the start. Then, I can attach this modified .txt file with no issues whatsoever, because the email client will see this txt file with no recognisable header identifying the filetype at all, and pass it as harmless.

Then, if I need to restore the archive, I simply download this attachment, open up Notepad++, insert "Rar" where it was before, rename the file extension from .txt back to .rar, and I have the original archive fully operational with no issues.

Meanwhile in the real world, Microsoft purchased 86-DOS and hired its author.

In the other news, I learned today that mod. prefix probably comes from soundtracker, which prefixed files with stk.

Since this thread is still hovering on the main page, i can no longer resist and quote Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets show:

Clearly people cared enough, Paranoid

I see various problems with files stating their kind in the actual file-header. Its probably fine if its just about a single platform/executable but if you go cross platform its going to get more complicated. the web is such a case, webservers invented MIME-types for it, it didnt work out very well, did it? having the type of file in its actual name does make sense.

but thanks to photon for pointing out that file extensions (or prefixes) on amiga have something to do with (dos based) BBSes, it totally makes sense now.

For performance reasons it's good to have the file type next to the directory entry.

I wonder why mime types didn't catch on. Maybe because MS-DOS file extensions served the same purpose but in less complex way? Also Microsoft's dominance in home computers at that time plays a part.

They were always pretty painful to manipulate, and required metadata support in the filesystem (which most filesystems didn't have, let alone if you were transferring stuff across machines; enjoy getting the MIME type along with e.g. an FTP transfer).