32by32 - Macintosh History from the 1980s

1985 Shareholder Meeting

On January 24, 1985, at the annual Apple Shareholder’s meeting, Steve Jobs previewed to an amazed audience an even more amazing piece of code that let Macintosh users switch between different applications almost instantly.

That software was, of course, Switcher — written by Andy Hertzfeld and the origin of an idea which would result in MultiFinder. What is interesting about this particular software demo is that Jobs himself showed off software which was written outside the offices of Apple, and by an engineer who was in the process of separating himself from the company.

Further, despite “dazzling the crowd,” according to InfoWorld Switcher was an unquestionable move away from the one-screen simplicity of the original Mac.

We can trace Steve’s interest in one-task-at-a-time computing to the abandoned “Single Window Mode” of Mac OS X Public Beta, to the iPhone and iPad, and finally the Full-Screen mode of OS X Lion.