OT: Yet Another Unhappy Customer for Vista

"switching" he

Desqview386 did allow you to assign a certain amount of processor time to background tasks.

Yep, and some didn't understand that even BIOS calls could mess up graphic screens.

Hair splitting. There may have been task dispatchers and pre emptive systems, but unless the CPU had multiple execution units, there was not TRUE multitasking. Just the appearance to us slow humans.

that gave timeslices to all active apps

I still have a copy of DV/X. I loaded it up on a machine not too long ago and it REALLY sings on new multi GHz hardware!

Jim

He is wonderfully consistent.

John

One can argue definitions, but I think it has been accepted for decades that a single CPU, running a multitasking OS, does indeed multitask. And there have been many multitasking OS's, since the

1960's: RTOSs (of which I've written a few), timeshare OS's, horrible non-preemptive things like Windows 3, and really horrible task switchers that only gave CPU cycles to the thing on top. But they all supported multiple contexts and switched between them.

Running TSRs wasn't true multitasking because a TSR had a single entry point, kluged somewhere into an interrupt chain, and didn't have a persistant context like a real application.

John

I think my point was, that this thread has gotten down to just that, an argument over definitions. We can split hairs all day long and it isn't going to change how a "certain person" acts. He is going to argue until he gets the last word, period. Multitasking, multiprocessing, context switching, TSR's, the list can go on and on. In most cases the end result is the same, the system appears to be doing more than one thing at a time, to us humans. That should be good enough, I guess.

Jim

[...]

That last bit isn't always true. TSRs can be written so that at the end of the code for every 18.2th of a second, a common routine is called. This code changes the vector to the next bit of code to run and then returns to the system.

This way things that take too long can be spread over many ticks. You can make it cycle, lets say, between 3 sections that each get to run every 6th of a second or so.

True, but the TSRs weren't general-purpose programs. A multitasking os should (by my definition, at least) allow one to load and run several true applications that run with identical OS services available to all, like a spreadsheet and a word processor, ideally multiple copies of each. It's really not difficult, although Microsoft did its best to make it difficult.

John

You're an idiot, TSR boy.

Fuck off, Jim Bob BeckTard.

Most of which were sitting, waiting for keyboard input. That would make any CPU time given to them wasted time.

There was a nice little routine that OS/2 used to demonstrate the release of timeslices given to an application where nothing was going on. It drove this point home immensely.

Pascal programmers knew about it.

As do I. Both the original disks, and recently DLd images of it, and QEMM AND DRDOS.

Yet does not support many of the peripherals attached to it, like UDMA, and SATA, and USB, ETC., much less large volumes.

So are you, turd breath. Get your head out of the KeithTard's ass, boy.

Yet another dope that makes up "accepted" meanings for terms.

Got one right.

Spreadsheets DO get "calculated" and it can take time. Word "processors" DO nothing but sit and wait for keyboard input. That is a very POOR choice for an example of an app that you would want to discuss true mutlitasking about.

Yes absolutely. What I described is not an OS. It also doesn't have a fixed entry point. I was only pointing out an error in detail not disagreeing with the broad thrust of your arguement.

Actually a lot of it was just sloppiness. They copied an old OS and used some very bad programming practices in converting it to run on the 8088. They stored data into code segments (SPIT) etc instead of putting them on the stack or in some data segment. This looked to me like it was a kludgy conversion from something that ran on a machine that couldn't address onto the stack.

Way back in the day, I disassembled large sections of DOS while trying to figure out what was happening in the TSRs I wrote. The DOS function entry point had more scar tissue than you could shake a stick at. The first bits of the code were very clunky. A little way into it suddenly there was a change in style and the use of a simple jump table to select the correct function.

In one of the routines, they did extra work so that they could return you a stack with an extra word on it.

No, that "someone" has a problem far bigger than terminology. ...a problem so big a psychiatrist can't help.

He doesn't believe that multi-tasking existed before Windows NT.

Nah, You give Dimmy too much credit. Read Dimbulb's answer to your post to see what the sticking point is (hint: it's on MassivelyWrong's shoulders).

That's where you're wrong. Dimbulb has to argue, even when he's dead wrong. I'd call it a character flaw, but it's the only character that character has.

If you mean that Multi-taskign is done by OSs other than WinNT and OS/2, then yes, mine is more broad. Functionally there isn't any difference though.

--
  Keith

THere you go with the gay references again, Dimmy. When did your mommy stop beating you?

--
  Keith

On Jun 11, 10:53 am, James Beck [....]

IIRC it was implied more than stated.

Common usage is what matters in this case. If the OS makes it appear that two things are running at the same time, it is called multitasking. The not really multitasking done in Window3.1 is sometimes called "cooperative multitasking". Ones where the OS takes control away when ever it wants is called "preemptive multitasking" when it isn't implied from the context.

Working with multiple cores is usually refered to as "multiprocessing". This is because the term got its start before more than one core could be in a chip. "Hyper threading" is a new term for basically the same thing.

When people are talking about flavors of Windows and mutlitasking, there are some special terms used only for that these are "horrid kluge", "botchware", "the Microsoft standard" and "Billiware". These all mean basically the same thing.