Timeline for When was the term ‘directory’ replaced by ‘folder’?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 19, 2023 at 22:02 | comment | added | Nimloth | I haven't used Dropbox in a while, frankly. But for OneDrive there really is a mix of local and remote files in the same folder, and they're downloaded on demand and possibly erased (!!) as needed (see "Storage Sense" in Win 10). A phone or camera connected via USB in PTP or MTP mode is not a filesystem but is shown as a folder anyway. The key point is that a Windows Shell folder is a list of items enumerated by software, possibly non-Microsoft software, and the simple listing of files in a physical or network directory is just one case out of many. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 17:59 | comment | added | Ruslan | With Dropbox the files in the cloud are always backed by local files, unless they are excluded from synchronization at a given host (and in this case you don't see them in the File Explorer). A better example would be NFS or SMB folders, which indeed are completely remote. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 15:14 | comment | added | user3840170 | Just because some users have trouble understanding it doesn’t make it not a user-level concept. I am not even claiming that most users even know the term ‘file system’ itself; however, the idea behind it, ‘data on storage media are organised in files kept in a hierarchy of directories’, was and still largely is exposed even to not particularly technical users (those that use locally-run, non-browser applications at least). And by the way, Windows 3.x, the first that managed to be at least somewhat user-friendly, still called them ‘directories’, not just in APIs, but in user interface. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 10:35 | comment | added | CGCampbell | @user3840170 You are obviously a power user, or advanced one. You might not get it. Consider someone who uses you as 'tech support' We all have that person or persons. For me it's my mother and father. I'm 58, and they are in their 70's & 80's. My father is a new "power user." He asks a question, I give him the real answer and he learns and goes out and discovers things and how they work on the Internet. My mother? Biggest challenge of my entire life is/was teaching her how to use a computer. She doesn't get any deep system concepts. C Drive? No way. Manilla folder on the desktop, she gets. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 7:37 | comment | added | Kaz | A file system may be the way data is structured on disk but a virtual file system isn't. The virtual filesystem is what defines the "directory" concept, which is then implemented by things like ext4, NTFS, FAT32, ZFS, ... "directory" is very much a higher level concept. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 5:48 | comment | added | Ponder Stibbons | For me, directory is definitely a user concept without taking that as a claim that it cannot also be an operating system structure. When I started out on UNIX, I thought is a directory as a directory - more or less a file that contained information about and links to other files that might also be directories. I found this structure very easy to work with. There is no improvement on that regarding OS that use the word "folder" for this. Indeed, under the Windows WSL, they are often very closely mapped to each other - depending on whether you use CLI or GUI. | |
| Jan 18, 2023 at 15:28 | comment | added | FeRD | Indeed, the original Mac OS used "Folder" exclusively (even having an "Extensions folder", etc. as official terms), which probably spurred the transition. It also just makes sense: The word "directory" was never a good fit, conceptually—it referred, originally, to the index file (the "directory" of files) that held the information about its contents, because that's how container-structures are represented in the filesystem. But users never cared about that, and shouldn't have to. Plus, in these days of network filesystems and etc., many folders are virtual and have no actual directory. | |
| Jan 18, 2023 at 1:30 | comment | added | Raffzahn | @user3840170 No, a file system is the way (file) data is structured on a disk. It defines how to find a root directory (if one exists), how to find files and how to find the file content and maybe other information about that file or the media. A FAT device structures that information different from a NTFS, which again is different from a Mac HFS or a Linux ext4. Confusion may stem from the word 'filesystem' also often use to mean the driver/translation layer used by an OS to translate these device specific information into abstract structures the OS knows to handle. | |
| Jan 17, 2023 at 19:46 | comment | added | Blackhawk | @user3840170 the next question you might ask is, "if everything is the same to the user, why not always use the same filesystem?" The answer is that each filesystem has different performance characteristics and limitations, and some provide additional features such as data redundancy, snapshotting, consistency guarantees, etc. | |
| Jan 17, 2023 at 19:43 | comment | added | Blackhawk | @user3840170 it's a lower level concept, often tied into the kernel - a filesystem refers to the structure of bytes on the drive used to store and index files and the software necessary to read, understand and interact with it. From a user perspective, the operating system is responsible for presenting a common interface of folders and files arranged in a tree. Think about an NTFS hard drive and a FAT32 USB drive - those are two different filesystems, but they appear to the user to be the same thing. | |
| Jan 17, 2023 at 19:03 | comment | added | user3840170 | Isn’t the file system a user-level concept? | |
| Jan 17, 2023 at 19:02 | comment | added | supercat | On the original Macintosh File System, all files on a drive were stored in the same directory, but each file's directory entry had a byte associated with it to identify which folder (if any) it was in. | |
| Jan 17, 2023 at 4:55 | history | answered | Nimloth | CC BY-SA 4.0 |