Here was the magic that Switcher introduced.

Open up Multiplan, and fire up some spreadsheet manifestation.

Then, launch Cricket Graph as the second app.

Go back to Multiplan, click on a column, Cmd-C to copy it, switch back to Cricket Graph and hit paste.

Voila! A new chart!

Now fire up MacDraw as a third app.

Back in Cricket Graph, Cmd-C the chart.

Switch to MacDraw, and Paste. Now the chart is in MacDraw. Not only is it in MacDraw, you can ungroup it and play with the primitives (the wedges of a pie, the bars of a chart, the legend as text and filled in boxes).

The magic here was that none of these applications were cooperating. It's not that they knew about each other. It was just the dumb luck of supporting common formats on the clipboard. Lines of numbers from Multiplan. A Quickdraw PICT resource from Cricket Graph.

It’s just hard today to appreciate how extraordinary that kind of painless integration was. None of these applications knew about Switcher, they all came out before it (mind, stuff was moving REALLY FAST back then).

And, how, much, much later, I tried to Copy and Paste a diagram from Visio into PowerPoint -- and it didn't work. That was a dark time.