One of the first architectural decisions that Bud and I made for the Macintosh system software in the spring of 1981 was that we were only going to try to run one application at a time. We barely had enough RAM or screen space to do even that, and we thought that we'd benefit from the resultant simplifications. Besides, multi-tasking was supposed to be Lisa's forte, and we didn't want to usurp all of the reasons for buying a Lisa.| folklore.org
By the fall of 1983, we had committed to announcing and shipping the Macintosh at Apple's next annual shareholder's meeting, to be held on January 24th, 1984. The failure of the Twiggy disk drive almost caused us to be late (see Quick, Hide In This Closet!), but it seemed like the new Sony 3.5 inch drive solved all of our problems, and the rest of the hardware was ready to go. The Macintosh ROM was frozen in early September and sent out for fabrication. All that remained was finishing the S...| folklore.org