Thread: Why Do They Call it a Recycle Bin

It was designed by a committee

Maybe because it sounds "green"?

But it has more to do with disc space being reused/recovere.

Fpm Macrumors

once upon a time windows stole the idea (big suprise right?) of a "trash can" from apple... apple sued so microsoft had to change it!

It has nothing to do with a lawsuit, but the thought is correct. Just as Microsoft put the desktop icons on the left side of the desktop instead of the right, they called the trash the recycle bin to differentiate Windows from the Mac. It's just one example of the many silly things Microsoft does in a futile effort to appear to have original ideas.

The recycle bin makes little sense as a concept, unless you have a geek awareness of bits and bytes -- which of course few users do. Apple also spent quite a bit of effort determining that placing icons on the right side of the desktop has cognitive advantages. Microsoft swapped them to the left just to be different, and because they don't care about human engineering.

My understanding is Apple supposedly stole the idea of temporary location of deleted files ( trash) from Xerox, if anything "recycle bin" makes more sense than "trash"

Because there is a maximum limit to how much stuff can be deleted before the space allocated to the 'bin' runs out. Then FIFO rules take over ie the oldest thing you deleted has its space 'recycled' to allow for the newest thing you deleted to be held in this mini purgatory.

I thought you were talking about one of these!

Bin.png