James Thomson, developer of, originally, DragThing and now PCalc, also happens to be the developer of the very first publicly shown version of the Mac OS dock. Now that it was shown to the world by Steve Jobs exactly 25 years ago, he reminisces about what it was like to create such an iconic piece of software history.
The new Finder (codename “Millennium”) was at this point being written on Mac OS 9, because Mac OS X wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders quite yet. The filesystem wasn’t working well, which is not super helpful when you are trying to write a user interface on top of it. The Dock was part of the Finder then, and could lean on all the high level C++ interfaces for dealing with disks and files that the rest of the team was working on. So, I started on Mac OS 9, working away in Metrowerks Codewarrior. The Finder was a Carbon app, so we could actually make quite a bit of early progress on 9, before the OS was ready for us. I vividly remember the first time we got the code running on Mac OS X.
↫ James Thomson
I especially like the story about how Steve Jobs really demanded Thomson live in Cupertino in order to work on the dock, instead of remaining remote in Ireland. Thomson and his wife decided not to move to the United States, so he figured he’d lose his assignment, or maybe even his job altogether. Instead, his managers told him something along the lines of “don’t worry, we’ll just tell Steve you moved”. What followed were a lot of back-and-forth flights between Ireland and California, and Thomson’s colleagues telling Steve all sorts of lies and cover stories for whenever he was in Ireland and Steve noticed.
Absolutely wild.
The dock is one of those things from my years using Mac OS X – between roughly 2003 and 2009 or so – that has stuck around with me ever since. To this day, I have a dock at the bottom of my screen that looks and works eerily similar to the Mac OS X dock, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon. It suits my way of using my computer incredibly well, and it’s the first thing I set up on any new installation I perform (I use Fedora KDE).
The dock used to be a major feature of MacOSX, it was shiny and gorgeous. Today it is flat and boring and has lost most of the functionality, let alone all style and pizzazz.
I miss holding Shift while clicking minimize and watch the windows melt away slowly. =)
Mac OS without the dock was painful for me to use. Once the doc showed up in OS 9 along with other features, I started to think Apple might have a future.
The Dock concept is actually from NeXTStep. The macOS version was just a refactoring of the Dock concecept from NeXTSTEP. The NeXTSTEP Dock functionality was split in two: pinned applications and running applications that you could pin. The two parts of the Dock (as well as the Application Menus) could be relocated. macOS pinned the file menus horizontally on the top of the screen (as early as Rhapsody and MacOS X Server 1.0) and unified the two components of the Dock under a single one that could only be put on the 3 remaining sides of the screen. Bottom dock made more sense in the 4:3 screen aspect ratio era, but now with wider screens I don’t want to loose such an important percentage of my vertical screen with the dock and I put it left (opposite to the desktop icons that are on the right).
And the Risc OS Dock was around before NeXTSTEP
Actually it came from the Accent/SPICE Operating System at Carnegie Mellon.
Accent is the direct precursor to Mach.
And this predates RiscOS or Arthur by a couple of years.
You can see the “dock” it in the demo at the bottom of the screen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TAO4-aTYVY&t=767s
I’ve never understood the dock or the need for it. Having one icon as both a shortcut to start the application and represent the running application doen’t make sense inside my brain. Also, the use of screen real estate and icons overlapping windows. – it’s just a janky gimmick to my eyes. To this end I never install one, even though there are many options available in linux.