[mdlug] The new "surface" computer

[Michael Rudas]

On 7/18/07, G Balaji <gopinathan.balaji at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/18/07, Garry Stahl <tesral at comcast.net> wrote:

>> Amiga (yea that again) uses file headers in that fashion from the very
>> start.  Learning to add file extensions was something I had to do once I
>> started using DOS based systems.

> I am not familiar with Amiga. In Amiga, how were files associated with
> applications? Was the operating system aware of the
> file-header-application association?

There was NO direct association between files and applications in
AmigaOS through at least v2.x-- the data-file icons had a field that
held the application-name associated with that file.  This meant that
to change the default application for a file-type the user had to
track down each file of that type and edit the icon's field to reflect
the new app.  I got around this by using the very-powerful "assign"
command.  The icon's field would contain something like "jpg:" for a
JPG file, and the startup-sequence would contain the command (for
example) "assign jpeg-view jpg:" where "jpeg-view" was the (example)
program used for viewing such files. If I wanted to change the default
viewer, I edited the startup-sequence.  This may have changed for
later versions.

-- Mikey