4 ms·
Even more so with the Mac's predecessor, the Lisa. Lisa didn't really have the concept of "applications" or "user programs". The "document" was a central feat
by retrac 3y ago
Even more so with the Mac's predecessor, the Lisa. Lisa didn't really have the concept of "applications" or "user programs". The "document" was a central feature, a core OS concept. Programs provided the OS with handlers for new document objects, which might be interactive. No programs ever started or exited from the user's perspective; it was always the same document interface, with slightly different document properties, depending on the document. In the background it was transparently loading and running the different handlers as OS tasks. No concept of "saving a file" either; the document state was implicitly always preserved when you closed it.
It was mostly programmed in object-oriented Pascal. One of the first big uses of an OO language. And it was terribly big and slow, requiring a fatally expensive amount of RAM at the time. A lot of those abstractions were stripped out for Macintosh in a bid to slim things down extensively, and they have not really been tried elsewhere since.
- esjeon 3y ago> The "document" was a central feature, a core OS concept. Isn't this largely the same in the modern desktop? File explorers do call handlers for each files. But it's also true that the recent trends among apps half-killed the concept of file explorer - they use built-in search functions these days. It's good in its own ways, but often it's necessary to go through filesystem when working with multiple apps, which can be awkward in terms of data management. Also, many apps automatically save states on close. A problem is that the behavior is far from being standardized, and there are tons of different ways how apps handle their states. This usually gets really painful, as one must learn each app through trial-and-error.