Why is the garbage can called the recycle bin?
What’s being recycled?
Apple had the Trash can on their desktop well before Microsoft copied it in its current form in Windows 95. Microsoft decided to take the concept and give it a similar but more eco-friendly name to be cute. Nothing is being recycled except for disk space. It is just a marketing ploy.
It’s just a marketing ploy by microsoft. It was originalyl called the trash can, but got renamed when evironmental responsibility started getting popular.
It’s called the recycle bin because it is a temporary storage for deleted items. You have to perform a two-step operation to permanently delete items from your computer. In other words, it’s designed to protect you from inadvertently deleting something permanently without thinking.
That, and it’s not called the trash bin because Microsoft lost that part in the GUI lawsuit with Apple.
yeah it’s just the ‘little can’ not the landfill; you can get the stuff back if you want to.
Disk space.
This is a huge improvement over the original implementation, the Macintosh Trash Can. When you dragged files into it and then emptied it, a tiny portion of your hard drive was permanently lost.
Of course, files were small and computers were slow, so it took a long time for the user to notice they seemed to have less free disk space than they used to. By the time it got troublesome, Apple would have the next generation Macintosh that the users would be obligated to upgrade to. Otherwise, you could have the Mac serviced at the Genius Bar (really, that just sounds like a breakfast edible) to replace the hard drive with one that didn’t have little bites taken out of it.
Yes, this is all a lie.
In the Mac it’s the Trash.
In Next Lisa it was the Wastebasket.
IBM’s OS/2 used Shredder! (you could glue the pieces back together, I guess)
Windows has always called it Recycle Bin. Now when was the first time they used it? Windows NT is the earliest I know of.
The recycle bin in Windows is simply a place to store a file out of the way when you ‘delete’ it. It gives a chance of recovering the file if you change your mind.
When you ‘empty’ the recycle bin the files become inaccessible but not actually deleted! The file contents stay on the disk unaltered but vulnerable to being overwritten.
It’s quite usual for the now inaccessible files to hang around for a long period of time and those who know how can easily recover them. Eventually the bit of disk they occupy will be partly or completely overwritten by some other file.
This gap between emptying the trash can and actual deletion is the downfall of many criminal types such as people who view child pornography. They think the files are deleted but they are easily discoverable.
As a corollary, if I as a fornesic investigator see a hard drive with no ‘deleted’ files I have a pretty good idea the owner is a bad sort who is moderately proficient at covering their tracks. Luckily in my experience even the most experienced criminals make inadvertent mistakes that can be discovered. It’s especially satisfying when the perp uses file wiping techniques and/or Tor Browser Bundle and I can find enough evidence to convict them from registry key fragments.
the trash can was on UNIX systems via CDE (and the HP-VUE it descended from) well before Windows had it.
Data in computers is all stored as a sequence of bits. (This much, y’all already know.)
For much of the earlier history of the computer era – in particular, before Personal Computers – bits were seen as an inexhaustible resource. There was a bigger supply of them available in the universe than anyone ever imagined we could ever use up.
That was then.
Now, with gigabytes on every desktop and terabytes on servers everywhere, the bit supply is looking more and more like an exhaustible resource; meanwhile, our oceans and the atmosphere are getting more polluted by the day with the decaying remains of used discarded bits. California has passed a law mandating a 50% reduction in used bits going to landfills. Research in mass-producing an ever-abundant supply of new bits is going painfully slowly. (And we thought that problem would be completely solved by the mid-1990’s!)
Recycling all our used bits is the obvious but “trendy” solution. It’s really just a feel-good solution, of course. The best we can do by recycling all our deleted files is to slow down the loss of our dwindling bit supply, putting off the inevitable until we can (hopefully) mass-manufacture them or possibly colonize other planets with their still-virgin bit supplies.
Exactly. That is why California has passed bit strict emission legislation set to take effect in 2018 just like they have with cars. That is going to be their downfall because Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook are going to be forced to relocate their server farms to areas like Arizona where there are no such bit emission controls and any pollution from them easily be exported into Mexico for legal but unethical disposal.
One problem out of many with that is that it is also a veritable war zone. Bits exported for disposal in Mexico can result in anything from rampant identity theft that dwarfs anything we have ever seen before to revealing U.S. military secrets. The Obama administration has only made half-hearted attempts at circumventing this imminent threat. Some ill funded attempts at intervention include skinning the Rio Grande for stray bits of data to building a metal wall that is impervious to them. All of these attempts are like trying to pee on a forest fire because they can travel even in a slight breeze. My confidential sources tell me this will be a huge issue in the next few years.
Pro tip - you can delete a file without sending it to the Recycle Bin by using Shift + Delete.
Screw all that. It ain’t my problem. (Hint: Learn to shred your bits before you recycle them, folks.) What frosts me is the biennial bit emission inspections that we will all have to get on every one of our computers, and the penalties if your computer fails the emissions test.
If it bothers you why not call it something else? Just right-click and “rename”, presto.
You can also change its icon to something else too.
Of course there is no undo when you shift-Delete, so be careful when you use it.
That is correct, although you do get a confirmation message “Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file?” As opposed to “Are you sure you want to move this file to the Recycle Bin?”
IIRC, there is a way to turn off that prompt, and I would recommend NOT doing that.
And full disclosure time: yes this HAS come back to bite me in the ass a few times.