I had looked for this page a while back and finally found it again: Lisa GUI Prototypes shows the story of the Apple desktop from the first prototypes of 1979 to the announcement of "Aqua" for Mac OS X in 2000. It was around October 1980 when the Lisa started looking like what we know today. Interesting things in this document are a couple of things that showed up in Mac OS X:
Another page documents an early form of Sleep:
Lisa has a soft power switch. When 'off' Lisa is actually in a low power mode. Press the power button while the computer is running the Lisa Office System program suite and Lisa saves all documents and shuts down. Press it again and Lisa boots back up and reopens all documents precisely as they were before the computer was turned off.[Apple Lisa Features]And also more details on the stationery feature, which even affected creation of folders in this document centric system:
There is no "New Folder" option in Lisa's File/Print menu. Instead, double clicking on the "Empty Folders" icon will create a new folder in the directory of the "Empty Folders" icon, which can then be placed wherever one wants.
Seeing the "Put Away" menu item in Lisa reminded me of a classic Mac OS feature that I imagine was rarely used, and does not exist in Mac OS X. The desktop in classic Mac OS was a magical place. It was meant to be like your normal desktop - you'd put documents or folders on there for a brief time for easier access to them and then put them away in their proper place when done. So if you had a folder nested deep in your hard drive named "Projects" and in there you had "My Current Project" as a folder, you could drag "My Current Project" to the desktop for easier access, and the Mac would remember its original location. What this meant was that when done, you could use the menu item "Put Away", and it would be filed back into the "Projects" folder nestled somewhere deep in your hard drive. In theory, this should have helped people keep their desktops clean. In practice, I don't think too many people knew it was there or what it could be used for.
There were some downsides to the desktop being a mystical place, however. Once you started having multiple volumes in your machine, dragging an item to the desktop kept that item associated with the volume it came from. When disks were disconnected or ejected, certain items would disappear. But it's a common thing to think "I need this file from this floppy, so I'll put it on my desktop and then eject.", only to have the file disappear when the floppy was ejected. Furthermore, using Mac OS "naive" applications that didn't understand the desktop could make finding items difficult - since the actual "desktop folder" containing the items was usually hidden. Mac OS X takes the route of making the desktop a folder in your home directory. It's still very easy to get to in open/save dialog boxes. And putting anything on your desktop is an actual "Move" operation, and in the case of moving from another volume, it's a "Copy" (Mac OS X lets you know this by changing the cursor to include the "+" symbol used to denote a copy when dragging a file to your desktop), so that putting something on your desktop from a mounted server, a removable drive, or whatever, means that removing that drive won't mean the sudden disappearance of a file. One thing is lost in this system though, and that's the "Put Away" action. There are times, however, where you want easy access to a particular file (like a project plan or folder) for a limited time, and then to put it away. This is where the Document side of the dock comes in, and I've found it quite useful myself. Drag a document to the dock, and you've got a shortcut to it right there. If the document is already open, you're taken right to it. If it isn't, then it's launched. I've found this very handy for tracking outliner documents used to track thoughts and to-dos for various projects. And since you can pick up a document's icon from the title bar of its window, you can place it on the dock without having to dig through the finder to get it again after saving it. And while there's no put-away action for the dock, removing an item is just a pick up and drag off - *Poof!*. Making aliases on the desktop work too, or even in "Favorites", although cleaning these up always require trips to the trash.Putting shortcuts on the dock seem to be the closest to the original desktop behavior.
