Finder Redux

By Marie D'Amico, 

Finder Redux or Bruce & Steve's Excellent Finder Adventure

You're trapped in a room with someone. Both of you must write the filing system for your company's new computer. It will revolutionize computing and spawn more cheap imitations than Rolex. You have six months to finish and <50K of memory. Drugs are not an option. This was the daunting task that faced Steve Capps and Bruce Horn, original authors of Finder 1.0, in the fall of 1983. Incredibly, they are still friends.

Horn started working on the Finder in early 1982, making detours to write the Resource Manager, the Dialog/Alert Manager, and parts of the Macintosh ROM; Capps joined the summer of 1983, after working on the Macintosh ROM. Both then worked frenetically on the Finder and the underlying Macintosh system software. Between April 1982 and January 1984, the Finder went through more iterations and compromises than NAFTA. Many features were borrowed from the Lisa, more were rejected by the aesthetic sheriff, Steve Jobs, and lots were gussied up by his deputy, Susan Kare.

In summer 1982, the Finder had the Macintosh represented by a window containing icons for two disk drives, a printer, and a power supply. See Photo 1. The menu commands were textual commands with icons to the left of the command name. Icons were opened by selecting the icon and choosing the "View It" command, represented by an iconic pair of eyeglasses. See Photo 2. Prior versions used the term "Do It", but users in earlier testing refused to choose this command, thinking it was "Dolt."

In this version, the disk drive, when opened, was represented by a life size floppy disk, with applications and documents represented as rectangular buttons on the disk. Both the windows and the icons could be overlapped. See Photo 3. Apparently, Jobs liked this version because a user could hold the diskette, point to the spot where he saw the icon, and say "this is where my document is stored."

In other incarnations of the Finder, variations of each feature of the user interface were designed and tested. See Photo 4. The window titles were designed as tabs and in a title bar. Title bars were eventually chosen because tabs didn't leave enough room to grab and move the window. The close box was once designed as a rectangular "Go Away" button, but this was later rejected.

At one time, title bars had miniature icons to the left of the window title, like the Lisa. This design was rejected once the close box was moved to this location. For a while, circular versions of the close box and the elevator box were tested. See Photo.

These were rejected since the team decided that, using pixels, small rectangles look much "cleaner" than small circles. Finally, this design process was capped by 72 consecutive hours of hacking just three days before the Macintosh introduction in January 1984.

When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, Apple televised an ad which stated that they would demonstrate why 1984 won't be like 1984. When Microsoft introduces Windows 4.0, as demonstrated at COMDEX, they will demonstrate why 1994 will be like 1984. But, now it takes 100 Redmonders, 400 man years, 100 MB, and $100 million to duplicate a two man, six month Finder adventure.

Software

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