Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Computer Chronicles - Business Software for the Mac (1987)" video.

  1. Remember, this was back when the DOS/Windows world was still struggling with the 640K limit.
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  2. 22:16 Luckily, that couldn’t happen, because an important restriction feature of MultiFinder is that you could not launch more than one instance of an application at the same time. I forget what happened in pre-System-7 days, if you tried to double-click a document belonging to an already-running application; maybe the Finder just threw up an error message. System 7 added the “AppleEvent” mechanism, and running apps that supported this would get a notification that they were being asked to open another document.
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  3. 17:55 MultiFinder was very useful, but it was such a hack. Windows belonging to different applications were kept in separate “layers”, and only those belonging to the foreground application could be moved/resized/interacted with. The ones in the background were effectively just painted onto the desktop, not real windows at all. Interestingly, this “layer” concept seemed to carry over to some extent to OS X, which you’d think, being a true multitasking OS, wouldn’t be bound by such obsolete restrictions. While OS X let you interleave windows belonging to different applications, it had this weird quirk where, when you closed the frontmost window, the next window to come to the front would come from the same application (if there was such a window), in preference to one from another application, even if the latter was next in stacking order. I think this limitation still exists in OS X/macOS today.
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  4. 10:50 Ah, I remember that Adobe Illustrator demo disk, with the Brandenburg 6th soundtrack ... and my first exposure to interactive Bézier curves ...
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  5. And then later on, in the 1990s sometime, IBM released a range of home-oriented machines called the “PS/1”. It was just as much a failure as all their other home-oriented efforts.
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  6. 9:37 I remember VideoWorks, as powerful as it was, was not taken seriously in its early days. Then, MacroMind doubled the price, renamed the product to “Director”, and suddenly it was seen as a professional-quality animation tool.
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