In fact it used to be called directory, before GUI shells emerged. So MS DOS to dispaly content of "folder" used command named dir.
Cheers, Marek Mosiewicz W dniu wto, 01.09.2020 o godzinie 06∶48 -0400, użytkownik The Wanderer napisał: > On 2020-09-01 at 04:29, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > [1] Why people keep insisting in calling those things "folders" is > > beyond me. They don't "fold" anything, do they? > > As I understand matters, it's an extension of the "desktop" metaphor. > > Back before computers (and to some extent afterward), people used to > keep files - in the form of physical, paper documents - sorted in > manila > folders, and only pull them out of those folders onto the tops of > their > desks for actual use; when computers came along and "desktop" was > invented as a metaphor for a hopefully-intutive user-interface > paradigm, > they called the things you could use to sort files apart from one > another so that they didn't all appear on the desktop at once > "folders" > in an effort to make that similarly intuitive. > > And then the terminology stuck. > > It probably doesn't hurt that a common way to display them > graphically > is in a nested, hierarchical tree style; the way a branch of the tree > collapses when the nodes under it are hidden can be intuitively- > enough > called "folding", much as a similar hiding collapse in your more > advanced code-focused text editor is commonly called "code folding" > or > "syntax folding". But I think that's secondary. >