You are correct of course, but the net effect is that anyone still using HFS must upgrade. And anyone who does not need a more advanced system or features might opt out because they do want to maintain backwards compatibility. Is that going to be a large number of users? No. But there are still plenty of people running G4s & G5s with Leopard (or Tiger with Intels) because they want Classic compatibility for use with old software (some of it custom for which there is no OS X counterpart) that continues to work. But imagine if you will that you have a number of drives which you have carried forward since 1995 (think ZIP disks and removable drives for which there are USB counterparts now) and continued to use in their originally Mac formatted HFS. No harm no foul. They continued to work normally as OS X happily reads and writes those files. Now, a user might be faced will converting all of those drives needlessly, because Apple felt like eliminating a perfectly useable file system which wasn't harming anybody.
That's what I meant. I went on a search for dates the various versions were released and came up dry. So when did AFP 2.1 appear? OS 7.5? What version appeared with OS 8.1, and 9?
Thanks for that link. I had been going to Gwenole Beauchesne's site.
Yeah I think that's about right.
However, with any luck, Paul Pratt will finish his Mac II emulator before that happens and all the built-in vintage Mac support anyone needs will be in it and it will play nice with OS X 10.6 and up. The problem of course will be that there will still be no way to write to physical media like ZIP disks and floppy disks. Theoretically couldn't a disk copy program write the correct data to a disk from an image made in an emulator like Disk Copy does for MFS under 8.1+? That would solve at least part of the problem of transferring files out, but not necessarily transferring them in. I wonder if it's possible for Mini vMac to tap into the USB ports and control external drives directly? Probably need some custom drivers. The best thing would be for Mini vMac to access the serial drivers directly and use good old fashioned AppleTalk, slow but functional.
Yup. Dropping HFS has pretty much made a requirement an intermediary OS X Mac running Leopard or less to work with any vintage Macs running a 68030 or less. The only positive is that there are numerous Macs available that can likely run 10.7 & 10.8 as well as 10.5 and serve this function. Once the next generation of Macs requiring Snow Leopard hits the streets, the writing will truly be in the snow.