From the «still awesome» department:
Title: The Mac OS X dock turns 25
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2025 22:52:27 +0000
Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/141482/the-mac-os-x-dock-turns-25/

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[1]

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).

Links:
[1]: https://tla.systems/blog/2025/01/04/i-live-my-life-a-quarter-century-at-a-time/ (link)

On 08 Jan 2025 04:17:05 GMT, Retrograde wrote:

> 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.

Yet another hangover from the time when it was thought to be a good idea
to commingle the GUI inextricably with the OS kernel.