Early History of Mac OS X Dock

article by James Thomson
January 4, 2025
https://tla.systems/blog/2025/01/04/i-live-my-life-a-quarter-century-at-a-time/

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So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th
of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X
to the world at Macworld Expo.

Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You all know
the Dock, it's been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like
forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).


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.

I didn't design the dock - that was Bas Ording, a talented young UI designer
that Steve had personally recruited. But it was my job to take his
prototypes built in Macromind Director and turn them into working code, as
part of the Finder team.

I had already written another dock - DragThing - before I worked for Apple,
and that had helped me get a job there. I moved over from Scotland to
Ireland in late 1996 with my future wife, with both of us joining the small
software team there. It was primarily a manufacturing plant, but there was a
little bit of software and hardware testing and engineering that went on
around the edges.

I worked on a number of things in the early days. I was on the Copland
installer for two weeks before the project was cancelled. Then, a couple of
Disney Print Studio CDs that shipped with the Performas. I loved doing UI
stuff, but somehow ended up working on a command line Mac OS X Server
authentication component for At Ease that was to be used with a new line of
diskless netboot computers that nobody had actually seen. It turned out I'd
actually been on the iMac project all this time, and in the end they got
hard drives.

In the middle of all that, when I was out in Cupertino, I was asked if I
wanted to work on a secret project with the code name "Uberbar". I was shown
some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it
leaked they would know it was me that had talked. I figured if anybody was
finally going to kill off DragThing, it might as well be me.

The new Finder (codename "Millennium") was at this point being written on
Mac OS 9, because Mac OS X wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders quite yet.
The filesystem wasn't working well, which is not super helpful when you are
trying to write a user interface on top of it. The Dock was part of the
Finder then, and could lean on all the high level C++ interfaces for dealing
with disks and files that the rest of the team was working on. So, I started
on Mac OS 9, working away in Metrowerks Codewarrior. The Finder was a Carbon
app, so we could actually make quite a bit of early progress on 9, before
the OS was ready for us. I vividly remember the first time we got the code
running on Mac OS X.

Because the Dock was a huge secret, along with the rest of the Aqua user
interface, it was only enabled on a handful of machines. I didn't see the
shiny lickable buttons of Aqua itself for quite a while after I'd been
working on the Dock . There were rumours that any screenshot of Aqua would
have the hardware MAC address of the machine encoded into the image, so
leaks could be tracked down.

Before I had ever seen the new UI, there was one moment where I had somehow
– I genuinely don't remember why on earth this happened – had been tasked
with designing a placeholder boot screen for the OS itself. I made a blue
shiny Apple with pinstripes, in the style of the iMac.

It lasted precisely one build before being yanked out extremely quickly. I
assume because somebody was unhappy with the entirely coincidental Aqua-like
appearance.

But I trundled away, making the best dock that I could while staying true to
the original design, and making frequent trips to the US, initially living
out of the Cupertino Inn across the road from Infinite Loop.

You may have heard me tell this story before, and I apologise if so. But
it's been long enough that people just know me for PCalc, and don't even
remember DragThing, let alone events that happened before some of you were
even born.

At one point during a trip over, Steve was talking to Bas and asked how
things were coming along with the Dock. He replied something along the lines
of "going well, the engineer is over from Ireland right now, etc". Steve
left, and then visited my manager's manager's manager and said the fateful
words (as reported to me by people who were in the room where it happened).

"It has come to my attention that the engineer working on the Dock is in
FUCKING IRELAND".

I was told that I had to move to Cupertino. Immediately. Or else.

I did not wish to move to the States. I liked being in Europe. Ultimately,
after much consideration, many late night conversations with my wife, and
even buying a guide to moving, I said no.

They said ok then. We'll just tell Steve you did move.

And so for the next year, I flew back and forth between Cork to Cupertino,
and stayed out there as much as regulations would allow. I had an office on
the Finder team corridor. I can only imagine that Steve would walk by
looking for me, and they would say he'd just missed me, while I was being
bundled onto a plane at the other end. I had to come over whenever there
were Dock demos, but I was not allowed to be left in the same room as Steve,
lest I reveal the truth. The demo room with the blanked out windows had two
doors, and I went out one before he came in the other.

In the end, Macworld 2000 happened, and finally all the secrets were
revealed to the world. I hoped that at this point, it didn't matter where I
was, and I could finally relax. Less than a month later, exactly on my
birthday I believe, I got another call.

I had to move to Cupertino. Or else. And this time, the "else" was that I
would be taken off the Dock and the Finder, and I couldn't be guaranteed any
interesting work ever again.

So I politely declined, and resigned. About three weeks later, the rest of
the remaining software group in Cork was fired. Clearly, the plan had been
to get rid of everybody, but they couldn't tell me that at the time. I
should have waited and I'd have got a payoff at least...

My version of the Dock shipped once to developers, with the Developer
Preview 3 of Mac OS X. John Siracusa absolutely hated it. We remain friends.

After that, the engineer who took over from me rewrote the Dock entirely,
and none of my code actually shipped to the public in the end. Eighteen
months of hard work out the window, ah well.

But I learned a great deal, made a lot of friends, and the experience
spurred me on to resurrect DragThing for Mac OS X, which proved very popular
for quite some time. PCalc also came back to life around then, and that's
still going today!

As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my
drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly
unsigned NDA.