[nicolaus]

I was a boy when I first saw that icon of a hard disk on a Macintosh System 6 desktop. The moment I saw it, I knew, instantly, EXACTLY what it implied and felt a deep sense of satisfaction that the person who came up with that (ostensibly a PARC person, not an Apple person, of course) was indeed a poet, probably someone who could gaze at a Magritte painting for an hour, just enjoying it.

The file-system-as-a-tree was and remains a powerful and useful abstraction ... that very few people are aware of. Not morons: my wife is brilliant, but when she saves that complex XCell doc with all its pivot tables, formulas and summations, she still appears to have no clue what happened to it.

And since the rest of the engineering community has also decided that the file system tree is "too hard" for people to understand, they are doing away with it on tablets now too: ever save or download something on your ipad (or apad for that matter) and struggle to find it?

So if mere mortals cannot understand where a file went on the file system tree, I sincerely feel like these poor guys writing Collections are handing a machine gun to a cave man by which they will be clubbed to death with.