Trash

The Trash, also known as Wastebasket or Bin, is a holding place for deleted items before they are finally removed from a Macintosh storage drive.

Classic Mac OS
Starting with System 1 in 1984, the Trash appeared as a simple 32x32 pixel black and white icon located at the bottom right corner of the desktop of the Finder. It did not "bulge" and users had to open it to check whether anything was in it as the contents would be deleted when the Mac was Shut Down, or the user selected Empty Trash... from the the Special menu.

With the introduction of System 4 in 1987, the trash can had the ability to "bulge" when files or folders were put into it. It was also visible on the desktop behind the windows of other applications when MultiFinder was enabled in System 4.2 and later.

With the introduction of System 7 in 1991, the trash was represented by a grayscale icon. It was now an actual directory that was not emptied between power cycles until the user specifically selected Empty Trash... from the Special menu. "Trash" was also visible as a folder when accessed by another computer over AppleTalk.

With the introduction of Mac OS 8 in 1997, the trash icon was updated with a three-dimensional appearance that was derived from NeXTSTEP.

In late 1999, Apple Computer discontinued the British English version of Mac OS 9, so that "Wastebasket" reverted to being called "Trash" like the U.S. version.

Mac OS X
With the introduction of Mac OS X in 2001, the classic 32x32 pixel icon of a metal trash can was replaced by a larger image of a wire mesh wastebasket located at the right side of the Dock by default. The icon would change in appearance if there were any items in it. It was called "Trash" in both the U.S. and U.K. versions. When accessed over a network, this invisible directory would appear as "501".

OS X and macOS
With the introduction of OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" in 2014, the icon of the wire mesh wastebasket was replaced by a translucent plastic wastebasket, but still called "Trash" in the U.S. and U.K. versions. The resolution was increased to 1024x1024 pixels to support Retina displays.

With the introduction of macOS 10.15 "Catalina" in 2019, the British English version of macOS renamed "Trash" to "Bin".