3 ms·
Nope. The MacOS Dock is a direct-line descendent of the NeXTstep Dock, which dates from 1988 and predates CDE by five years.
by SeanLuke 3y ago
Nope. The MacOS Dock is a direct-line descendent of the NeXTstep Dock, which dates from 1988 and predates CDE by five years.
- jmclnx 3y agoYes it is from NeXT, but the the article describes a dock at the bottom of the screen that is centered. NeXT Dock by default was on the left side and vertical, so NeXT is irrelevant per the article. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png So the first dock I new of as described by the article was CDE. As someone mentioned RisCOS may have preceded it.
- SeanLuke 3y agoI have a NeXTstation on my desk, thanks. The MacOS X dock, since day one, has been able to be pinned vertically on either side or centered horizontally on the bottom, as a user option. It functions identically regardless. The dock was derived straight from the Rhapsody dock, which was just a port of the NeXTSTEP dock. The RiscOS shelf thing was a simpler device, but it was a year earlier, agreed. But your claim was that MacOS X's dock is derived from CDE, or I guess now RiscOS, and these claims are very highly dubious. Indeed with a good probability NeXT's engineers had not even seen RiscOS. The NeXTSTEP dock, complete with a black hole (later recycling sign) for trash can, was meant to be reminiscent to how people often laid out icons on the Mac Finder Desktop.
- jmclnx 3y agoYes, MAC OS dock came from NeXT, but by default NeXT did not center it on the bottom, the article said middle-aligned. The only one I remembered doing that did that by default is CDE, not NeXT. Someone else brought up RiscOS. By your logic, I could say Xerox Alto was the first if a launcher could be added and centered at the bottom manually :)