The idea of the computer “recycle bin”the operating system function intended to temporarily contain deleted files which has recently also been present on smartphone operating systems, It was born with the Apple Lisa operating systemintroduced in the 1983. Lisa’s user interface was largely the work of Bill Atkinsonan engineer who worked at Apple and who already from 1978 he set to work on the latter.
Atkinson thought of the icon of a trash can to make the concept of temporary deletion of files visible and easily understandable to non-experts. This innovation proved to be a turning point in the way of interacting with the computer, greatly facilitating the use of the system by non-expert users, so much so that Apple coined a claim advertisement, which read:
If you can find a trash can, you can run a computer.
Using the Recycle Bin was actually extremely simple, as Lisa’s interface allowed you to delete files simply by dragging them to the symbol of the bin with the lid. Initially, the contents of the Recycle Bin were lost when the computer was restarted; in 1991with the introduction of Mac OS 7 (at the time known as System 7), instead, the content was deleted only if the user decided to empty the trash.
The concept of the “trash” was adopted in the years that followed by various Apple competitor operating systems, including Friend And Microsoft Windows. In particular, Microsoft introduced its own graphic version of the trash can (embellished with the recycling symbol) only in 1995with the advent of Windows 95. Strictly speaking, the operating system MS-DOS 6 Microsoft had a file deletion system – Delete Sentry – which, however, was decidedly rudimentary when compared to Apple’s, as it was not used through a convenient and intuitive graphical interface.
Today, the Trash icon is widely used on various desktop and mobile operating systems and applications to invoke various delete functions. Who knows… maybe the next time you go to delete a file from your computer by dragging it to the Trash, you will appreciate the history behind this very popular gesture.
