In 1986, Apple released the Mac Plus which came standard with 1 MB of RAM. This amount of memory was sufficient to support some form of multitasking, which was first implemented by Andy Hertzfeld in his Switcher program, demoed in January 1985 on a Macintosh 512k, and released as a beta in April 1985. Switcher worked by designating a number of fixed "slots" in memory, into which applications could be loaded. The user could then switch between these applications by clicking a small button on the top of the menu bar. The current application would horizontally slide out of view, and the next one would slide in. Despite its awkwardness, this approach did fit well with the existing system's memory management scheme, and applications needed no special programming to work with Switcher. This early work on Switcher led to the development of MultiFinder by Apple system software engineers Erich Ringewald and Phil Goldman.
MultiFinder was the name of an extension software for the Apple Macintosh, introduced on August 11, 1987 and included with System Software 5. It added the ability to co-operatively multitask between several applications at once – a great improvement over the previous systems, which could only run one application at a time.
I was never a big fan of the MultiFinder up until it was integrated into System 7. It might have been because I was using a Macintosh 512k with half the memory of the the new Mac Plus. Or it might have been because I preferred to run a single application at a time. Either way it didn't really matter, I was only 5 years old and even at that young attention deprived age I could only play one game at a time. You can read more about how the Switcher can to be developed by Andy Hertzfeld [here.](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt)
