Re: BOFH on Macs

In article <5ms6p8Ff0gshU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ian McCall <ian@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2007-10-07 14:22:27 +0100, T i m <news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:06:12 +0100, Tim Streater
<timstreater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Macs have been multitasking for 20 years - and have
supported multiple screens for 20 years.

I wonder why no one else corrected me then .. or in fact someone else
even commenting on going to W95 for the feature?

Multiple screens since antiquity, but multitasking is contentious.

Yes, the Mac has been multitasking for about twenty years, since the
introduction of MultiFinder. But, up until OS X, that multitasking was
co-operative not pre-emptive: you relied on one app to programmatically
yield to another for that multitasking to work so the whole thing was a
bit patchy. It also didn't have protected memory, so a crash in one app
could bring the machine to a halt.

This is all true. It *did * rely on apps being properly programmed. But
provided an app was expecting to interact with the user a lot, and so
calling Wait_for_event (or whatever it was called) appropriately things
worked fine. Even something like Intermapper, which normally just sat
there doing SNMP queries regularly and not much else, co-existed quite
happily with BBEdit as I did lots of database development while
monitoring our network. Both these apps are written by people who know
what they are doing.

It was calculating ¼ to a million decimal places that was the killer.
.

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