Re:Ask HN: Why did major desktop OSes settle on a macOS-like...
by jmclnx on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:37PM
(#36331401)
Yes, MAC OS dock came from NeXT, but by default NeXT did not center it on the bottom, the article said middle-aligned.
The only one I remembered doing that did that by default is CDE, not NeXT. Someone else brought up RiscOS.
By your logic, I could say Xerox Alto was the first if a launcher could be added and centered at the bottom manually :)
The MacOS X dock, since day one, has been able to be pinned vertically on either side or centered horizontally on the bottom, as a user option. It functions identically regardless. The dock was derived straight from the Rhapsody dock, which was just a port of the NeXTSTEP dock.
The RiscOS shelf thing was a simpler device, but it was a year earlier, agreed. But your claim was that MacOS X's dock is derived from CDE, or I guess now RiscOS, and these claims are very highly dubious. Indeed with a good probability NeXT's engineers had not even seen RiscOS. The NeXTSTEP dock, complete with a black hole (later recycling sign) for trash can, was meant to be reminiscent to how people often laid out icons on the Mac Finder Desktop.