On 9 Jun 2003 at 15:33, Phil Daley wrote: > At 06/09/2003 02:38 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >On 8 Jun 2003 at 21:17, Philip M. Aker wrote: > > >> Firstly, I claimed that "Multitasking as an issue is only important to > >> Windows developers...". > > > >Why would that be? Multitasking is something that all GUIs provide. > > Your definition of multi-tasking is a little broad. Most people do not > consider event-driven cooperative multi-tasking "true" multi-tasking. It's > easy for one program to take over the machine and not allow anything else > to run.
Well, Philip Aker seems to me to have been using a broader definition than *me*, or maybe a narrower one. To me multi-tasking is multi-tasking. If you can run two apps simultaneously, you've got multi-tasking. TSRs in DOS count under that definition. And certainly so did Desqview (which was actually damned good). But all of that is cooperative multi-tasking. It's not "true" multi- tasking only if you limit the "true" form to multi-tasking controlled entirely by the OS. Cooperative multi-tasking obviously requires that the apps give up control to the OS at appropriate times, and Win3.x did not have that. Win95 and all the Win9x kernels had real preemptive multi-tasking for all 32-bit apps. But things could still lock up if there was a problem in one of the 16-bit subsystems, which while running in their own virtual machine could still lock things up because they could address hardware directly. [] > >> I'm not sure of the date, but certainly before the end of 1986, > >> Apple released AUX (Apple Unix); which is multitasking by definition > >> and also supported a concurrently running MacOS that had all GUI > >> features of that period. So the statement: > >> > >> > Microsoft got it right long before Apple, by introducing decent > >> > multi-tasking by Windows 3.0 > >> > >> is very misleading because obviously Apple had a multitasking system at > >> their disposal years before Microsoft but for one reason or another > >> decided it was not advantageous to use it at the time. Perhaps the > >> Amiga fiasco scared them off a bit. I saw Windows 3.0 many years ago. > >> It was pathetic. > > > >OK, I was trying to make sense of what you said, which to me was > >nonsensical. You said Windows programmers had to deal with multi- > >tasking and Mac programmers didn't. I took that to me that your > >remarks about the Mac messaging loop were not counted by you as > >multitasking. I didn't understand what you could possibly mean by > >that, but took you at what I understood to be your word. > > > >> Finally, I have to question whether either you or Jari truly understand > >> that the (old) MacOS had it's way of arriving at solutions that MS has > >> to use multitasking for. > > > >There you go -- I cannot make any logical sense out of what you've > >just said. First you say Mac has multitasking. Then you say it > >doesn't. > > Both Windows 3.0 and the Mac were handicapped by the lack of pre-emptive > multi-tasking. But Win95 was not. And Win3.x's multi-tasking was pretty good compared to the Macs of the time, according to what I heard from the people I was working with, who were Mac refugees. > In my opinion, well written Windows apps cooperated better than Mac apps, > leading people to say that Windows was better at cooperative multi-tasking. That may be. I don't know. After 1995-96, it wasn't really an issue of comparison to the Mac, as Windows had real pre-emptive multi- tasking for 32-bit apps. By 1997-98, you could definitely have a very stable system if you wanted it (with NT 4), without sacrificing much at all in terms of cost, performance or usability. > >I thought Macs multitasked (cooperatively) from the release of the > >very first Mac in 1984 (or whenever it was). They allowed you to run > >more than one application at a time, right? So, they were > >multitasking. > > On a Mac, the foreground app seemed to get most of the time, background > apps pretty much sat there doing nothing. Which leads me to believe that perhaps the Win3.x cooperative multi- tasking was, in fact, better at sharing resources than that of the Mac. > >Now, *how* they did it is another issue, and one where it's pretty > >clear they did it differently from what MS implemented in Windows. > > > >But the MS approach was better in the long run, as it worked for a > >lot longer, and laid the groundwork for real multitasking much sooner > >than the Mac got it. > > I agree. I still don't understand what Philip Aker is trying to get across here. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
