What I Miss in OS X

I'm nostalgic for Trash

During the presentation on OS X Yosemite, it was said that much effort went into the redesign of the Macintosh Trash. I think part of that was convincing Sir Jony Ive that skeumorphism should still prevail in this one bit of the operating system. But since the release of OS X 10.1 in March 2001, it actually hasn't been a trash can.

During the last thirteen years (fourteen, if we count in the OS X 10.0 public beta), it's been called trash, but it has looked like a wastebasket. With 10.10 it looks like a different sort of wastebasket (a plastic one, instead of a wire one). I miss Trash.

I've had a Mac since the days of System 4. Way back in 1984 or 1985, I got to play with a friend's Mac running the first System (on floppy). That was my introduction to Trash, which was a marvelous thing in the context of the day.

In DOS, if you wanted to delete a file, you typed something like "del myfile.txt" and it was gone. Forever. Being able to put something into the trash and then change your mind (unless you emptied it), that was amazing. That was the whole difference between marking a file for deletion and actually deleting it.

It will never happen, but I wish they had marked 10.10 by bringing back the Oscar-the-Grouch style trash can.