This story is especially notable for the little tidbit about both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I'm always impressed by their business acumen.
Also notable as an early anecdote on the development of user interface/experience. It's funny how complicated simplifying the user experience can be from the engineering perspective.
Another interesting tidbit was Microsoft's habit of storing bytecode (to be interpreted) making the developer's life much, much harder. Hmmm, sounds like curiously similar to more recent news...
I don't think it's really fair to call this "multi-tasking". Curtainly a predecessor, though. A more accurate description would be "task switching", whereby each application had reserved memory, but only one application ran at a time. At the user's request, another application would take over and run. There was no CPU time-slicing. That came later, when Apple introduced the Multifinder extension in System 7.
Andy rocks.
awesome story. thanks for posting it!
Can I be the first to say, "About time!"
Hmmm ... wonder if the Memory Shift guys ever sued Apple for IP/copyright infringement ... fast forward 25 years, you know Steve definitely would ...