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by yodon 723 days ago
I was referring to Switcher, from 1985, which I believe ran on 128k Mac's. I was referring to Switcher because it set the user experience patterns and expectations for how app switching should work that led to multifinder and OSX per-app switching patterns.

The Mac OS has always been an app-first experience (leading users to tend to talk about the name of the app they are using) where Windows has always been a document-first experience (leading users to talk about the file type of the document they are opening). Apps and Documents are obviously both important, so this is a big of a ying and yang thing where it's clearly two sides of the same coin, and yet they lead to a bias to talking about, for example, keynote, which is an app, and to talking about PowerPoint decks, which are documents (again, a bias, not a totality).

1 comments

Thanks for the reply.

> I was referring to Switcher, from 1985

Ah, OK. You didn't _say_ that, though.

> which I believe ran on 128k Mac's.

I don't think so, no.

The story of its development is here:

https://www.folklore.org/Switcher.html

It mentions needing the RAM, but not what system version. MultiFinder came in with System 5:

https://www.folklore.org/Switcher.html

... so, before that.

I would guess System 2, which was contemporaneous, but I don't know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS#Release_history

> I was referring to Switcher because it set the user experience patterns and expectations for how app switching should work that led to multifinder and OSX per-app switching patterns.

Huh. OK. I had never considered that before.