Immediately after the first Finder prototype, I wrote a second which was much more recognizable as the ancestor to the Finder that shipped. This prototype was a nonfunctional prototype that did not actually read the disk, but instead, read a text file that described a hierarchy of files within folders that would be displayed in windows. Our filesystem at the time did not have the concept of directories, so I had to fake it with the proof-of-concept prototype.
Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: The Grand Unified Model (2) - The Finder
Hey, that’s what I do.
