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Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Switcher |
 | | After taking a short vacation, I got back to work on what I was now calling "Switcher" in early December and by Christmas I had much of it implemented, including a simple UI for selecting applications and "Switcher Documents" for remembering sets of related applications. |
 | | Getting Switcher going wasn't that hard, but it was a very difficult program to finish, because it overturned some of the underlying assumptions that applications were making, yet it was committed to keeping everything working anyway. |
 | | That was partially because Microsoft was a very early developer, and took liberties with the system that most developers would shy away from, but it was mostly because the instructions comprising their applications were encoded in pseudo-code to save space, in the tradition of the byte-code interpreters from Xerox, which Charles Simonyi advocated. |
| www.folklore.org /StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt (3301 words) |