A brief history of the Finder

Do you occasionally double-click on a folder in a Finder column view, expecting it to open that folder in a new window? If so, somewhere deep in your neurones are a few that still remember how the Finder worked in Classic Mac OS, quite differently to that in modern macOS. This article traces its history.

In the original Macintosh human interface, the Finder was its centre, the scene of all interactions between the user and the computer, apart from applications. There were no diversions like a Dock, and little by way of ornament.

Even when it had gained colour with the Macintosh II and Colour QuickDraw, the Finder in Classic Mac OS was a clean and spartan environment, with no toolbar, no traffic lights, just basic controls. At the top left is the close button, and the drag resizer is at the bottom right. But its biggest difference from today’s Finder was that double-clicking a folder within a window opened that folder in a new Finder window, according to its underlying spatial metaphor, hence its name. If you double-clicked with the Option key held, the previous window was automatically closed as the new window opened on top.

Thus, each Finder window could only show the contents of a single folder, and that location couldn’t be changed within that window. Navigating from one folder to another was accomplished by opening windows. It wasn’t uncommon to end up with stacks of half a dozen or more, each displaying the contents of a different folder, and Steve Jobs once unjustly criticised this as turning the user into a window janitor.

Note in this screenshot from 1999, showing Mac OS 9.0, the printer and disk icons on the upper right of the Desktop, and the Trash can at the bottom right. There was no Dock until Mac OS X inherited it from NeXTSTEP.

Here’s another example, this time from 2001. The upper window here shows the top level of a bootable disk, Scratch1, with its custom System Folder icon containing the bootable System for Mac OS 9.1.

Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah brought with it the distinctive blue-and-white Aqua look, traffic lights at the top left, and the first toolbar. This view shows its tools being edited, and how its special folders and locations including iDisk, a precursor to iCloud, were arranged in the toolbar rather than any sidebar. This replaced the Classic spatial metaphor with an interface more akin to a browser, a move that proved unpopular with some.

By Mac OS X 10.4 Panther, the sidebar was added. The original Aqua style is here being progressively replaced by brushed metal, and it worked more like NeXTSTEP than Classic Mac OS. Two of its three view types are shown here: Icon and Column views, the third being List view, and those remain today, with the addition of what was originally Cover Flow and became Gallery view after Mojave.

Optical disks added tools for ejection, and to burn writable media from the Finder’s toolbar. The Finder’s Preferences were starting to offer subtle customisations including ‘spring-loading’ using drag-and-drop.

In 2007, Mac OS X Leopard introduced bespoke icons for certain document types, such as images, with a thumbnail preview. Categories offered in the sidebar included Devices such as disks, Places for popular folders, and quick access to some Spotlight search categories.

These are the toolbar options for OS X 10.11 El Capitan from 2016, still with support for optical disk burning, to which are added Finder Tags (also a category in the sidebar) and the new Share tool.

The Finder also has the privilege of featuring one of the oldest obvious bugs in macOS, affecting the width of column views, as demonstrated below in macOS 10.15 Catalina of 2019, and still present in Sequoia.

The Finder underwent its last major redesign in macOS 11 Big Sur, when all traces of brushed metal were removed, icons were changed, and every corner became rounded. It’s a far cry from the original spatial metaphor.

Reference

Wikipedia on changing style in the Aqua interface style.