“Many Mac power users and developers are concerned about the iOS-ification of the Mac OS and how much more of that process will be found in sessions at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next week in San Francisco. A recent developer blog post recalls talks by Steve Jobs from a 6 years ago, where he speculated on whether computer users really needed to interact with a file system. But to me, it also recalls a mostly forgotten Apple OS from around 20 years ago,” David Morgenstern writes for ZDNet. “In his blog, iOS developer Ole Begemann, tells of watching a 2005 video of Jobs speaking at the D: All Things Digital conference.”

In every user interface study we’ve ever done […], [we found] it’s pretty easy to learn how to use these things ‘til you hit the file system and then the learning curve goes vertical. So you ask yourself, why is the file system the face of the OS? Wouldn’t it be better if there was a better way to find stuff?

Now, e-mail, there’s always been a better way to find stuff. You don’t keep your e-mail on your file system, right? The app manages it. And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy. You keep it in this app that knows about music and knows how to find things in lots of different ways. Same with photos: we’ve got an app that knows all about photos. And these apps manage their own file storage. […]

And eventually, the file system management is just gonna be an app for pros and consumers aren’t gonna need to use it. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, 2005

“Begemann said this sounds in many ways like iOS and its relation to users and data,” Morgenstern writes. “However, to my ears, it also sounds like the object-soup file approach that Apple used in the Newton OS, which was first released with the Newton MessagePad in 1993, almost 20 years ago.”

Much more in the full article here.