Hacker News Reader

steve1977

It was also called folder in Atari TOS, which was clearly inspired by Mac OS as well.

That was Digital Research’s GEM, which Atari had licenced for the GUI of TOS (they threw it together quite quickly). There was a whole thing about GEM and inspiration from Xerox PARC and Apple; that’s largely the reason why the Atari version was the only version that really made it to any kind of brief success.

I vaguely remember seeing GEM even used on DOS PCs back in the early 90s.

It was the only way to use a couple of very early DTP packages (Timeworks being the one I remember).

Of course, by then it was after GEM 2 and had been neutered by the lawsuit which forced it to abandon the desktop metaphor for 2 permanently tiled windows

It is both on the Atari ST

The user interface shows folders but the programming manuals refer to directories.

In the File menu in TOS 2.06 it lists both Create Folder... and Close Directory

Reply on news.ycombinator.com