What is Multi-Mac?

Of all the early Macintosh multitasking solutions, the most astounding and puzzling event was the sudden appearance of Multi-Mac in late 1985 - after Switcher, but well before Servant and MultiFinder. It had a copyright from an unknown company, "Aubrac Systems", and was written by a previously unknown developer "Jwa van der Vuurst". Since the code makes hundreds of undocumented calls to the ROM, many people suspect the claimed authorship to be an alias, covering clandestine development from inside Apple. If not, Multi-Mac certainly represents a monumental feat of reverse engineering! It works only with a 512K mac and the 64K ROMs, and was never updated.

Some of the features of Multi-Mac anticipated future Macintosh systems by several years! For example:

• Disk caching, which speeds up the Mac significantly,
• Aysnchronous file management allowing, for example, background file copying by the Finder in System 4!
• True simultaneous execution of multiple programs, each sharing the screen,
• A drop-down application menu on the right hand end of the menu bar,
• Lazy menus, i.e. the menu drops when the mouse passes over it without requiring a click.

 - (Stories of Early Mac)

Download Multi-Mac for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 2.0 up to Mac OS 3.3

Compatibility notes

Requires a 64K ROM.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac