It’s interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders and didn’t have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because navigation was so painful.
Finder aided this by being spacial. If you moved a window, then closed it, it stayed there the next time you opened it. If you moved a folder or file icon around it similarly stayed where you put it when you next opened up the window.
But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru your folder trees each time in Finder? Most apps I’m finding have folder structures with a bunch of aux files. It’s not so seemless as a dock or even a start menu.
> But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru your folder trees each time in Finder?
Back in the day, Finder used to remember whether folders were open on the desktop or "put away". It was a direct, one-to-one mapping between your spatial awareness of objects in the real world and the representation of objects in the computer. Meaning that things were left exactly where you put them on-screen, just like in the real world and, hence, it was easy to find your applications because they will be right where you left them.
But you don't need to launch applications, you just double-click on documents. Mac OS remembered which program was associated with each document -- not each document type or extension, each document. Each file had distinct type and creator codes associated with it, so that a JPEG created in Photoshop will be opened in Photoshop, and a JPEG downloaded off the web might be opened in a browser, when double-clicked.
Mac OS, pre-X, was quite simply the best UI ever designed. It took advantage of pioneering research into human-computer interaction and the underlying psychology of how humans relate to objects in a way that nobody today -- not even Apple -- is doing. It is what all UIs should aspire to be like, even today.
I think the whole spatial desktop metaphor is overhyped. Rather than go point by point on this, I encourage you to use OS 9 for a week or two to actually do work in. Relive using it versus just from memory. Then I’m curious to see if you still feel that way. My guess is you’ll realize it’s actually not all that.
More often than not I was opening documents, not apps. But with spatial windows in Finder I used to just arrange my Applications folder the way I wanted (sometimes using Aliases) and have it open on the left of my screen, then have my Documents on the right. I kept a row of Desktop icons visible with an In and Out box.
There wasn’t a default folder structure in the early days. Your hard drive had a “System” folder with merely a few hundred files in it (in a hierarchy) that you can ignore day-to-day. Otherwise the whole drive was your playground.
O, it can be. It's not /the/ way, but it is a way. Often, aliases (shortcuts/links) to favourite apps ended up there, or on the desktop, or in one of various available launcher utilities.
But now we're just adding 3rd party software to change the fundamental UX. The GP was talking about how much better it was back then, but if you need 3rd party tools to make it work, then it really wasn't.
OS 8 also allowed you to drag any folder to the bottom of the screen to create a pop up tab, and switch any folder view to the At Ease view, so you could do the same thing without any third party software. But DragThing is just awesome.
