MacBinary is similar to BinHex, but MacBinary produces binary files as opposed to ASCII text. Most dedicated FTP programs for the Mac, such as Fetch and Transmit, transparently decode MacBinary files they download. E-mail programs such as Eudora can extract and decode MacBinary mail messages. macbin file extension appended to the ends of their filenames. Apple's own solutions, AppleSingle and AppleDouble, were never widely adopted in the user community.įiles encoded with MacBinary, regardless of the version, usually have a. MacBinary was one of the most popular solutions, although BinHex was also used on UseNet, where data transfer was not 8-bit clean. This problem led to a number of solutions that combined the two forks together into a single file, and then automatically pulling them back apart when they reached another Mac. This presented the possibility that the two would be separated at some point, or not properly recombined when they were transmitted back to the Mac. Those systems, unaware of the fork concept, would have to store the two forks as separate files. This presented a serious problem when the file had to be stored on other computer systems. Physically these were separate files, but the OS would ensure the two separate files were always treated as a single object, so dragging it to a floppy disk in the Finder would copy both forks.

To address this, Apple introduced the concept of forks, allowing any file in the filesystem to have both a resource fork and a data fork. However, the resource system had the significant limitation that the maximum size of any single resource was only 32 kB, far too small for storing document data. These resources were also widely used in documents to store rich media like sounds and images. In contrast to other computers of the era, Macintosh applications included both computer code as well as a large number of resources that were used by the operating system (OS) itself.

Mac binary editor