Apple Insider is giving us a thorough run-down on the history of the Virtual Desktop in anticipation of Apple’s launch of OS X Leopard. Leopard will ship with ‘Spaces’, Apple’s own take on the Virtual Desktop.

What has surprised me most in recent years is that nobody seems interested in why we continue to try and fit everything into the ‘Desktop’ metaphor at all.

As I understand it, when they were trying to decide an interface at Xerox PARC, they thought about who would use the tools they were developing. It is a sign of the times that they thought the only person likely to be sat in front of a keyboard any time in the future would be a secretary - so the developers went down to the typing pool and looked at how a typist might understand the World of work.

It’s for that reason, and that reason alone, we have the metaphor of a ‘file’ and a ‘folder’ and a ‘desktop’ within modern user interfaces.

There have been experimental interfaces to shift the metaphor, but these experiments have normally failed because the chosen metaphor has been so weak. Surely there has to be a better way to think about the way we work now we have fully embraced the hypertext document, the network as the computer and the social network?