In the Macintosh operating system, a Desk Accessory (DA) was a piece of software conforming to a particular programming model. The purpose of this model was to permit very small helper-type applications to be run concurrently with any other application on the system. This provided a small degree of multitasking on a system that initially didn't have any multitasking ability at all. Some argue a variant of a desk accessory reappeared in Mac OS X 10.4 with Dashboard.