A small utility program for the Macintosh, such as Calculator, Notepad, Key Caps, or Scrapbook. Up through System 6, desk accessories were a separate kind of executable from applications. If you were running Finder you could only run one application at a time, but any number of desk accessories; in order to run many applications, you needed to run MultiFinder, which took more RAM. Since System 7, both apps and desk accessories can multitask.