Andy Hertzfeld’s Meeting With Bill Gates Regarding Switcher

A lot of readers are emailing me about the Macintosh on Bill Gates’s desk in this picture from the ’80s in yesterday’s New York Times profile of Steve Ballmer. It’s not really all that surprising — back then, writing Mac software was a much bigger part of Microsoft’s overall business. This story from Andy Hertzfeld is a perfect example — he had a one-on-one meeting with Gates to negotiate a deal to write Switcher, the first multi-tasking implementation for the Mac.

★ Monday, 29 January 2007