The first things I do for new Mac people.

[ka jowct]

Some people can’t be helped much. One of my pet peeves is having every freaking piece of crap someone is working on or has downloaded sitting on the desktop. The concept of files and folders is not difficult, but it seems to be beyond some people.

When I first started working with a Mac, in 1986, a supposedly computer savvy co-worker told me that one of the biggest problems I would have would be naming and organizing files. I was stunned by that, because we worked for a company that had a 4-digit job number for every job, and the questionnaire/research materials we were going to typeset already had short, easily abbreviated names that we all knew. Different types of studies had short acronym names. Our clients, amazingly, had names. Even given that we had to stick to 8 characters for stuff that would be shared with the Windoze people, it could not have been simpler to figure out how to organize the files: by job number, client, and whatever the document was. When I said that I was just going to organize them by job number and client and so forth, she looked at me like I had just cracked the Theory of Everything.

[freeradical]

Some people just rely upon "bucket apps" such as Yojimbo to sort everything out...

[GGD]

ka jowct wrote:
When I first started working with a Mac, in 1986, a supposedly computer savvy co-worker told me that one of the biggest problems I would have would be naming and organizing files. I was stunned by that, because we worked for a company that had a 4-digit job number for every job, and the questionnaire/research materials we were going to typeset already had short, easily abbreviated names that we all knew. Different types of studies had short acronym names. Our clients, amazingly, had names.

Luckily you started in 1986 and the HFS file system was in place and folders really were directories in the file system. With MFS there were still folders but they were just an illusion created by the Finder. The disk was just one big flat volume, so you couldn't have a file with the same name in two different folders.

But floppies only held 400K bytes, so there wasn't really room for a whole lot of files.

[ka jowct]

GGD wrote:
[quote=ka jowct]
When I first started working with a Mac, in 1986, a supposedly computer savvy co-worker told me that one of the biggest problems I would have would be naming and organizing files. I was stunned by that, because we worked for a company that had a 4-digit job number for every job, and the questionnaire/research materials we were going to typeset already had short, easily abbreviated names that we all knew. Different types of studies had short acronym names. Our clients, amazingly, had names.

Luckily you started in 1986 and the HFS file system was in place and folders really were directories in the file system. With MFS there were still folders but they were just an illusion created by the Finder. The disk was just one big flat volume, so you couldn't have a file with the same name in two different folders.

But floppies only held 400K bytes, so there wasn't really room for a whole lot of files.
I remember going to a nearby store that sold Apple equipment to get system upgrades on floppies, probably System 5. We started with a Mac that had no internal HD, just a floppy drive. We added an external floppy drive. It took a couple of minutes sometimes to change pages in a PageMaker document.

I also remember the fun of backing up jobs to 800k floppies, and then a couple years later, backing those up onto high density floppies, and then backing those up onto CDs. Hours out of my life that I will never get back.