Connectix

Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became popular. It was formed in October 1988 by Jon Garber; dominant board members and co-founders were Garber, Bonnie Fought (the two were later married), and close friend Roy McDonald. McDonald was still Chief Executive Officer and president when Connectix finally closed in August 2003. Primary products included these: Virtual: Its original flagship product, which introduced virtual memory to the Macintosh operating system, Mac OS, years before Apple's implementation in System 7. Virtual also runs on a motley assortment of accelerator cards for the original Mac, Mac Plus, and Mac SE, which were not supported by Apple. HandOff II: The file launcher developed by Fred Hollander of Utilitron, Inc. This INIT for Macintosh solved the "Application Not Found" problem by launching a substitute application for the one that created the file the user was trying to open. Apple would later build a similar functionality into System 7. SuperMenu: The first commercial hierarchical Apple menu, developed by Fred Hollander of Utilitron, Inc. Again, Apple would make a hierarchal Apple menu standard in System 7, by buying one of the many shareware versions of the same concept. MODE32: Software which allows 32-bit memory management on "32-bit dirty" Macintosh systems. Later bought by Apple and distributed for free, at least in part to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by customers who demanded to know why their 32-bit 68020 microprocessors could not access more than 8 megabytes of RAM. Optima: Makes System 6 32-bit clean and puts a Macintosh IIsi into 32-bit mode. This makes all of the physical RAM addressable by System 6. It can have one application open at a time. MAXIMA: A RAM disk utility, better than the one that later came with Mac OS as it saved its contents before and after reboots, while also allowing booting from the RAM disk.