The famous macOS dock has just turned 25 years old.

The macOS operating system of Apple has changed a lot since its first release, but it continues to maintain many features from the early years that make it unique. One of these elements is the iconic Dock, which allows users to keep their favorite applications accessible with just one click – and you might not know this, but the macOS Dock just completed 25 years and there's an interesting story behind it.

The Secret Behind the macOS Dock

Developer James Thomson, behind the popular scientific application PCalc, worked at Apple during a time when the company was developing the first version of Mac OS X, which would later be replaced by the classic Mac OS 9. Interestingly, Thomson is one of the creators of the macOS Dock and now has shared some stories about the industry on his blog.

The Dock was revealed to the world by Steve Jobs at the Macworld Exposition on January 5, 2000. On the same day, Jobs also showed the first vision of the Aqua user interface, which was not present in the early beta versions of Mac OS X.

At the end of the presentation, he showed the Dock. Everyone knows what a Dock is; it has always remained at the bottom of your Mac screen as if it were there forever (if you keep it in the correct position, of course)," said Thomson.

The first Dock included with Mac OS X was very different from what came with the final version of the operating system. Instead of floating icons, there were bright and welcoming Aqua buttons. There were rumors that any joke in Aqua would encode the hardware MAC address in the image, so leaks could be traced.

Things started to become a bit complex for Thomson while living in Ireland, working at the company's offices in Cork. According to him, Jobs was angry when he informed him and asked Thomson to move to the United States to work with the rest of the team in Cupertino. "It came to my attention that the engineer working on the Dock is in f*cking Ireland," Steve allegedly said to a manager.

Thomson did not want to move, so he began to frequently travel to Cupertino while the team told Jobs that he had accepted to live in the United States. "I had an office down the hall from the Finder team. I can only imagine that Steve passed by there looking for me and said that I had simply missed him, while I was being set up on a plane on the other side of the world.

After Macworld 2000, when Aqua and the Dock were presented to the world, Thomson was informed that he would have to move to Cupertino for real or risk losing his job. He refused and resigned. In the end, the Dock was completely rewritten by another engineer before the official launch of the first Mac OS X.

But I learned a lot, made many friends, and the experience pushed me to restart DragThing for Mac OS X, which was very popular for several months. PCalc restarted during that period and continues to do so today!

Of course, without Thomson's code, the Dock continues to live on today – not only on Mac, but also on the iPhone and iPad. Make sure to read the full story on Thomson's blog.

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