5 ms·

Switcher (2004)

162 points by mmphosis 4y ago

dang 4y ago
Related: Mac OS gets multi-tasking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319308 - May 2010 (7 comments)
floren 4y ago
Bill Gates' clumsy attempts at lowballing were humorous, but Jobs was the true star of the story with his thinly-veiled threat of a lawsuit if Andy didn't sell it for the price Jobs demanded.
- ralfd 4y ago
  Bill Gates raising his offer because Andy doesn’t know what to respond is also a great story. And shows how great a manager Bill is with his congratulating letter. Andy was extra motivated to make Microsoft apps work because he felt he promised them. Jobs offering more than twice as Gates is nice, but boy must it be stressful when he decides to go confrontational.
vxNsr 4y ago
Fascinating story. Especially interesting how he still felt compelled to make Microsoft’s apps work without any input from them. If it was important for them you’d think they'd agree to let him have access to the actual source code to debug. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what pseudo code is in this context.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I'm sure they would have - but in the heat of the moment you don't have time to learn someone else's code when you can just fiddle some bytes, throw it in the debugger, aha!
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Early versions of Word ran in a custom interpreter Microsoft wrote. Think like Java or WASM bytecode. To debug this properly would require writing a special version of that interpreter with debugging features built-in. Debugging an interpreted program by debugging the emulator it's inside of is a special kind of hell. Even moreso if you don't have debugging symbols for that emulator either. Instead of "step to next instruction", it's "step to next bytecode fetch, step through the interpreter's jump table, step through the implementation of that instruction, figure out what it is, repeat". Each one of those is multiple machine code instructions and you will lose track of things very quickly.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    Wow now that’s interesting I didn’t fully understand what he meant by pseudo code, but this makes it especially interesting!
  - jll29 4y ago
    > 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. I never heard of that; Simonyi is usually associated with his "Hungarian style" of prefixing variable names by type indicators (sz_* for pointers to strings implemented as zero-terminated character sequences etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation ). Writing office in interpreted bytecode must have slowed down things quite a lot, and back then there was not JIT compilation available. Does anyone have specifics on that VM (e.g. opcode table)?
bombcar 4y ago
The various TSRs and application switching tricks on the PC that had their heyday just before Windows came down were amazing - so many applications had been made to run in low-memory systems that 512k or even 1MB (UMB!) was quite a bit. I had a HP Palmtop that was greased to the skids with things like that, quite a powerful device. Even the modern iPhone doesn't quite do app switching as well, to be honest (the apps are often just reloading).
- dilap 4y ago
  Well, it works great if the apps aren't flushed -- but after an update about, I dunno, I wanna say 12 to 18 months ago, apps get terminated all the time (at least on my iPhone 12). Since modern apps sort of expect not to be quit, they're generally quite bad about restoring state. Back in the early days of iOS it wasn't such a big deal -- apps expected to be quit and were good about restoring state. (This is a general problem with iOS itself too -- to use one salient example, pre-iOS 7, the phone was rock solid at remembering what you were listening too. Set your phone down, come back however much longer later, plug in the headsphones, hit the pause button on the headphones, whatever you were listening to starts right back up. Post iOS 7, not a chance. In general iOS 7 was just a dramatic downward plunge in software quality, and iOS has never recovered. Speaking of terrible software quality, now that I've reached 4 paragraphs, it's taking Safari maybe 1 second to echo each keystroke. So maybe some sort of quadratic algorithm processing text in this input box. Good lord.)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It has gotten insanely aggressive- I can have two apps total open and switching between them causes a clear and present reload.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > Since modern apps sort of expect not to be quit, they're generally quite bad about restoring state. Which is also a recent development that includes Apple's own apps, too. iOS guidelines used to explicitly state that your app must expect to be terminated, and should restore state.
maroonblazer 4y ago
I'm surprised Andy didn't counter Jobs' offer of $100K, even if it didn't go anywhere. I have to think Jobs was savvy enough to expect him to counter, in which case he would've met him somewhere in between. Perhaps he knew AH well enough to know that he wouldn't counter..?
- charles_kaw 4y ago
  Andy did counter tho, he got royalties.
pdevr 4y ago
Folklore has a lot of these amusing and insightful stories. Here is one which I found amusing (except for the condescending adjective to describe Bill's voice - which I don't agree with), involving both Steve and Bill: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_...
pdevr 4y ago
A few interesting tidbits: Bill Gates: "a really good programmer like you should be able to write at least a thousand lines of code per week". So the expectation for a really good programmer was around two hundred lines per day, assuming five days of work every week. That is not far away from today, even after almost four decades. Bill Gates: "If it takes ten weeks, and you get paid four thousand dollars per week, that means you should get paid $40,000 for writing it." So, around $100 per hour, effectively? Looks like Steve offered $250 per hour (assuming Bill's calculation is not widely off the mark). This was back in 1984. Thirty-eight years later, salaries have not increased by that much!
- gurchik 4y ago
  > Around here we pay our best programmers around two thousand dollars per week. Which in 2022 dollars is $5700 per week.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- adolph 4y ago
  https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. [...] He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    "Lines of code are not produced but spent" (can't remember the author)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BobMackay 4y ago
I was present at the BMUG meeting on Berkeley campus when Andy demonstrated Switcher for the first time. He did no talking, but simply ran up two or three applications... and then the whole screen scrolled sideways and the audience was on its feet cheering! The event was amazing, only perhaps matched by Bill Atkinson's demo of Hypercard. Happy days!
fsociety999 4y ago
It’s pretty amazing that these programs used 128KB of memory. Nowadays, it is rare to find a program that uses less than 128MB. I know I’m being a bit hyperbolic. There are definitely apps that use less than that, but my point is more that the actual capabilities of the software have not always increased at the same pace as the resource usage.
buzzert 4y ago
Video of it in action: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU&t=4m14s https://youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU&t=4m14s (@ 4:14)
DrTung 4y ago
The sidesweep you do on your iPhone to change the page of app icons or when you switch fullscreens on your Mac I am sure is inspired by the Switcher.

Switcher (2004)

162 points by mmphosis 4y ago

dang 4y ago

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

floren 4y ago

Bill Gates' clumsy attempts at lowballing were humorous, but Jobs was the true star of the story with his thinly-veiled threat of a lawsuit if Andy didn't sell it for the price Jobs demanded.

ralfd 4y ago
Bill Gates raising his offer because Andy doesn’t know what to respond is also a great story. And shows how great a manager Bill is with his congratulating letter. Andy was extra motivated to make Microsoft apps work because he felt he promised them. Jobs offering more than twice as Gates is nice, but boy must it be stressful when he decides to go confrontational.

vxNsr 4y ago

Fascinating story. Especially interesting how he still felt compelled to make Microsoft’s apps work without any input from them. If it was important for them you’d think they'd agree to let him have access to the actual source code to debug. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what pseudo code is in this context.

bombcar 4y ago
I'm sure they would have - but in the heat of the moment you don't have time to learn someone else's code when you can just fiddle some bytes, throw it in the debugger, aha!
kmeisthax 4y ago
Early versions of Word ran in a custom interpreter Microsoft wrote. Think like Java or WASM bytecode. To debug this properly would require writing a special version of that interpreter with debugging features built-in. Debugging an interpreted program by debugging the emulator it's inside of is a special kind of hell. Even moreso if you don't have debugging symbols for that emulator either. Instead of "step to next instruction", it's "step to next bytecode fetch, step through the interpreter's jump table, step through the implementation of that instruction, figure out what it is, repeat". Each one of those is multiple machine code instructions and you will lose track of things very quickly.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  Wow now that’s interesting I didn’t fully understand what he meant by pseudo code, but this makes it especially interesting!
- jll29 4y ago
  > 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. I never heard of that; Simonyi is usually associated with his "Hungarian style" of prefixing variable names by type indicators (sz_* for pointers to strings implemented as zero-terminated character sequences etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation ). Writing office in interpreted bytecode must have slowed down things quite a lot, and back then there was not JIT compilation available. Does anyone have specifics on that VM (e.g. opcode table)?

bombcar 4y ago

The various TSRs and application switching tricks on the PC that had their heyday just before Windows came down were amazing - so many applications had been made to run in low-memory systems that 512k or even 1MB (UMB!) was quite a bit. I had a HP Palmtop that was greased to the skids with things like that, quite a powerful device. Even the modern iPhone doesn't quite do app switching as well, to be honest (the apps are often just reloading).

dilap 4y ago
Well, it works great if the apps aren't flushed -- but after an update about, I dunno, I wanna say 12 to 18 months ago, apps get terminated all the time (at least on my iPhone 12). Since modern apps sort of expect not to be quit, they're generally quite bad about restoring state. Back in the early days of iOS it wasn't such a big deal -- apps expected to be quit and were good about restoring state. (This is a general problem with iOS itself too -- to use one salient example, pre-iOS 7, the phone was rock solid at remembering what you were listening too. Set your phone down, come back however much longer later, plug in the headsphones, hit the pause button on the headphones, whatever you were listening to starts right back up. Post iOS 7, not a chance. In general iOS 7 was just a dramatic downward plunge in software quality, and iOS has never recovered. Speaking of terrible software quality, now that I've reached 4 paragraphs, it's taking Safari maybe 1 second to echo each keystroke. So maybe some sort of quadratic algorithm processing text in this input box. Good lord.)
- bombcar 4y ago
  It has gotten insanely aggressive- I can have two apps total open and switching between them causes a clear and present reload.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Since modern apps sort of expect not to be quit, they're generally quite bad about restoring state. Which is also a recent development that includes Apple's own apps, too. iOS guidelines used to explicitly state that your app must expect to be terminated, and should restore state.

maroonblazer 4y ago

I'm surprised Andy didn't counter Jobs' offer of $100K, even if it didn't go anywhere. I have to think Jobs was savvy enough to expect him to counter, in which case he would've met him somewhere in between. Perhaps he knew AH well enough to know that he wouldn't counter..?

charles_kaw 4y ago
Andy did counter tho, he got royalties.

pdevr 4y ago

Folklore has a lot of these amusing and insightful stories. Here is one which I found amusing (except for the condescending adjective to describe Bill's voice - which I don't agree with), involving both Steve and Bill: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_...

pdevr 4y ago

A few interesting tidbits: Bill Gates: "a really good programmer like you should be able to write at least a thousand lines of code per week". So the expectation for a really good programmer was around two hundred lines per day, assuming five days of work every week. That is not far away from today, even after almost four decades. Bill Gates: "If it takes ten weeks, and you get paid four thousand dollars per week, that means you should get paid $40,000 for writing it." So, around $100 per hour, effectively? Looks like Steve offered $250 per hour (assuming Bill's calculation is not widely off the mark). This was back in 1984. Thirty-eight years later, salaries have not increased by that much!

gurchik 4y ago
> Around here we pay our best programmers around two thousand dollars per week. Which in 2022 dollars is $5700 per week.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
adolph 4y ago
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. [...] He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
- nine_k 4y ago
  "Lines of code are not produced but spent" (can't remember the author)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BobMackay 4y ago

I was present at the BMUG meeting on Berkeley campus when Andy demonstrated Switcher for the first time. He did no talking, but simply ran up two or three applications... and then the whole screen scrolled sideways and the audience was on its feet cheering! The event was amazing, only perhaps matched by Bill Atkinson's demo of Hypercard. Happy days!

fsociety999 4y ago

It’s pretty amazing that these programs used 128KB of memory. Nowadays, it is rare to find a program that uses less than 128MB. I know I’m being a bit hyperbolic. There are definitely apps that use less than that, but my point is more that the actual capabilities of the software have not always increased at the same pace as the resource usage.

buzzert 4y ago

Video of it in action: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU&t=4m14s https://youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU&t=4m14s (@ 4:14)

DrTung 4y ago

The sidesweep you do on your iPhone to change the page of app icons or when you switch fullscreens on your Mac I am sure is inspired by the Switcher.