“I Live My Life a Quarter Century at a Time”

Two days ago was the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs unveiling the Aqua interface for Mac OS X for first time at Macworld Expo. James Thomson published a great personal retrospective on one particular item of the Aqua UI that was shown off at the event: the original dock.

The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored. I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.

James has told this story before, but there are new details I wasn’t familiar with, as well as some links worth clicking in the full story.