automatic sizing of windows

Late in the last century one of the Macintosh operating systems had a feature that allowed windows to open to the size of of the Desktop. That is, when I opened a window, it opened to the full height that I could get on my monitor. Before this feature, the Mac opened new windows to only the size of the original 1984 Macintosh. It's been a long time since we used monitors that small.

But, for a long time now, OSX has reverted to the 1984-Macintosh window size. When I open a new window, I have to re-size it if I do not want to spend half the day scrolling up and down in the window.

Am I missing something? Is there some setting in OSX that would automatically open new windows to fill the space available on the Desktop?