As Finder was developed for the first Mac

Work on the Finder - most importantly, what did you do in Mac programmers division. The first Finder presented himself as a floppy disk, which you can view the files on the disk. For its implementation were taken into account all the advantages SmalltalkBut it was still far from being a real program. Immediately after the creation of the first working prototype was written by a second, more similar to the real ancestor of modern Finder.

The new prototype maintained double-click to open folders, files, applications, drag and drop files. But it was all for show, none of the members was not functional. The new prototype showed only that the team of Steve Jobs wants to create in the end.

According to the plans of the team, Macintosh was supposed to be very friendly to the user's computer and the Finder, as an important part of the program of the first Mac, is obliged to be very simple. For a start, it was important to remove the restrictions on the file names.

While the file name may not exceed eight characters and always had to contain a suffix with the extension. It was decided to give users the ability to name your files as they want, including spaces. In addition, many people do not really like the fact that customers have to deal with different extensions for file type recognition. This work is just for the computer, so the information on the type of object has ceased to be the default view and stored independently in the same directory as the file.

But keep expanding in this way was not enough. And if in the same folder will be many different types of files, or the user wants to open the same files in different applications? Finder had to know which program created the file in order to select the best option for the user. For example, one of the text files opened in MacWrite, and the other - in WriteNow. The user can open files, and forced him into a convenient applications by simply dragging and dropping the desired icon.

By implementing storage of the type of data file and program-maker, it was decided to use the informative icons in the Finder. Each object has been associated with their particular icon corresponding to its properties. The shortcut you can easily guess which of the applications running on the file. In order not to hinder the work of Finder icons are not copied from the directory with the program, and cached in the system directory. So a base desktop data.

The database to store and process information on programs to open certain types of objects and their icons. Finder when faced with a file he was looking through the database of the desktop and check if it works with the file first, and tied the desired labels. If it was not finished matching the properties of files and programs-creators copied into the database with a unique identifier.

At the end of 1982 it was almost finished Filer - a similar program for the Lisa computer. But it took too much memory space for Mac team's standards. Though all of the code for this program was provided in open access within the company, the Finder was written from scratch.

Release of the first Mac occurred in January 1984, year, but in the end of 1983 due to the influx of journalists, some programmers were forced to move to another office to finalize Finder 1.0 exactly in the lines. As a result, the application was received, occupying 48 KB of disk space. Finder was eight times lower than Lisa Filer. Mac team was overjoyed.

via Folklore.org