MultiFinder
More info
- Creator
- Erich Ringewald, Phil Goldman (Apple)
- Released
- Type
- System extension
The 1987 add-on that let several Macintosh programs keep their windows open at once, with a cooperative multitasking model that lasted fourteen years.
The first Macintosh ran one program at a time. Andy Hertzfeld's Switcher from 1985 made it possible to hop between several programs held in memory, with a sliding animation and still only one of them on screen. Erich Ringewald and Phil Goldman took the next step with MultiFinder, shipped with System Software 5 in October 1987: every program's windows share one layer, the Finder keeps running in the background and print jobs can queue while you work. The icon at the far right of the menu bar showed which program was active and switched on a click.
The multitasking was cooperative. A program held the CPU until it asked for the next event itself, and each one got a fixed memory partition that the user set in Get Info. A program that hung therefore took the whole machine with it. MultiFinder was optional at startup in System 6, became compulsory and nameless in System 7 from 1991, and the model lasted until Mac OS X in 2001. The Lisa, incidentally, had run several programs at once, with memory protection, back in 1983 – in a computer almost nobody bought.