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Switcher (2004)

https://folklore.org/Switcher.html
109sammatilda | | 34 | HN
gwern | parent | next
For perspective, that's >$320k today. For 'switching apps'. It's always kinda crazy to look back and realize how incredibly minute and small programs were back them. Like 'spellcheck' being a project you'd assign half a dozen programmers to or Knuth would write almost a book about.
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thechairman12 | parent | next
Whimsical follow up here: $100k invested in the S&P 500 around 1984 would be $4.5mm today. Thought some people would like to know this as well :)
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simondotau | parent | next
Despite being small, it probably represents more original thought and engineering insight than many modern apps with 100 times the LOC.
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jakelazaroff | parent | next
One of my favorite programming blogs has a post on exactly that: https://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html
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anticodon | parent
I'm pretty sure were it not for Knuth and other programmers solving spellcheck and other problems, big and small, AI wouldn't be able to solve programming tasks today.
saagarjha | parent | next
I'm actually kind of surprised that Apple didn't just automatically own the rights to the program. I guess times were different back then.
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com2kid | parent | next
Reading these types of of stories growing up was always humbling.

I started at Microsoft on the Windows Mobile compiler team, having never taken a compiler class in college. I was surrounded by people who had already done great things, and by the time my career started the glory days of doing real software engineering was already waning.

I got to work with a few of the greats during my time as Microsoft, and I wish I'd taken up an in offer I had to meet Raymond Chen.

Sitting next to people of old school caliber and watching them work is, to use the proper word yet again, humbling as hell.

Fuck your design patterns. These people can debug starting at assembly, and sometimes when that fails they'll debug by pulling out an oscilloscope. Then when that is done they'll build design patterns on top of the foundations they laid themselves.

diskzero | parent
Yes, it was humbling and one reason was many of them had developed their skills in tandem with the growing complexity of the hardware and software. They had an amazing advantage of being there when it was all happening and being built up around them.

As for design patterns, I would never accuse Andy of using them. He was a coding wild man and super impressive, but his real skill was coming up with cool ideas and willing them into existence. Working with him, I always felt he was going through the jungle making paths with a machete and the rest of us had to actually build the roads behind him.

cowlevel | root | parent
You can still get this experience by trying to do some things the old ways. One that's come up to me recently: program an ATMega328 (the famous Arduino chip) in assembly to output a waveform with tight timing requirements.

That is, as opposed to using a timer interrupt or a delay routine, arrange instructions so that the processor naturally gets to the instruction to change the output pin at the correct time, within the acceptable tolerance. These processors have no caches or predictors so instruction timing is reliable.

I think people are doing it these days on the Raspberry Pico chips, but any "old school" microcontroller will do.

bix6 | parent | next
Who did they sell to for the $50k royalty?
flomo | parent
It shipped with Microsoft apps, so quite possibly them?

(The article doesn't mention this later became "Multifinder" and included with System 6 iirc.)

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defrost | parent | next
Searching for "IBM PC Memory Shift software utility 1984" returned no useful hits for the software described that way early on the article.

As a 1980s developer I wonder if that may have been a reference to Borland's Sidekick launched in 1984.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick

Or was Memory Shift an actual TSR swapper I simply never encountered?

smallstepforman | parent | next
Meanwhile, Amiga 1000 Workbench (also released in 1985) not only had application switching, even when full screen, they had desktop screen switching where each screen can be different resolution / colour depth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDDndh6OPK4

The key combo was Amiga-M to send window to back of stack, and cycle windows.

BTW = Amiga had preemptive multitasking

But the world decided to ignore the Amiga and focus on MsDOS and black and white MacOS.

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tomhow | parent | next
Previously:

Switcher (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32414661 - Aug 2022 (30 comments)

"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637862 - Aug 2010 (110 comments)

Mac OS gets multi-tasking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319308 - May 2010 (7 comments)

joshu | parent | next
i have thunderscan.com and need to get it to andy and/or set it up with something useful