Aqua Turns Twenty-Five on January 5 ⇥ tla.systems

Jason Snell, in the March 2000 issue of Macworld:

Suddenly, the future is now. Shortly after the calendar clicked over to 2000, Apple unveiled Mac OS X’s brand-new interface—named Aqua—giving the world its first glimpse of how we’ll all interact with our Macs for years to come. […]

[…]

Perhaps the most radical addition to the Mac OS interface in Mac OS X is the Dock, a strip that lives at the bottom of your screen and displays the contents of open windows (you can even opt to have it appear only when you move the cursor to the bottom of the screen, like the Windows task bar).

James Thomson:

The version he [Steve Jobs] 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 was not using a Mac until after Mac OS X 10.2 was released, so I am by no means a good barometer for the Mac-iness of early releases. One thing I remember clearly, though, is being smitten with it from my earliest use; I was among many who downloaded Aqua Dock to get a taste of the experience on my Windows computer.

I still cannot believe it took until perhaps five years ago for me to become a Dock-on-the-side person, however.