🚀 go-pugleaf

In <313907EC.2F1C@nauticom.net>, rab <rab@nauticom.net> writes:
>Tommy Lee wrote:

>>    I'm not so familiar of what is "Pre-emptive" multitasking. But the Amiga
>> is certainly better than WIN on the multitasking issue...

>I don't think this has anything to do with avoiding disk errors. It's
>just that Intuition (the Amiga's GUI) is not multi-threaded. 

Intuition itself doesn't matter, as it's only responding with user
input -- it's basically a GUI server in the Amiga OS. Any program
using the GUI is an Intiution client, and Intuition handles different
resources for each one (message, messageport, signal, etc). 

What you're complaining about is the lack of multithreading in
Workbench. Workbench is the graphical shell used by default in the
AmigaOS, it's also an Intuition client. When you have several active
programs already started, start a long copy in Workbench and then
select another window and pull down its menu. If you see the second
window get selected and its menu pull down, you're seeing Intuition
behaving properly in a multthreaded environment. If you see that busy
cursor go up on the Workbench during a copy, you're seeing Workbench
not behaving as a multithreaded graphical shell. 

>I've used Windoze and OS/2 (I like OS/2 a lot), OS/2 is the next best
>thing to the Amiga's OS, but Windoze 95 and 3.1 still suck by
>comparison. 

The Amiga OS got one thing right these others are still yet to see,
and that's the multithread support you get in Intuition. In Windows
and OS/2, there's one global event queue, not a queue per GUI
subscriber. So if any program locks up the event queue, the rest of
the GUI freezes. This may not seem all that unusual in Windows, where
it kind of goes hand in hand with Windows (16-bit or 3.1) cooperative
multitasking -- a program can lock you up, period. But even under
OS/2, which does have real preemptive multitasking, delays in event
handling by one task can screw the response of all your
others. Because of the real multitasking, OS/2 programs can get around
much of this by queuing their own events, but few do it.

>I don't think that Microsoft has ever understood what a GUI is all
>about. 

They're learning. That's why the Windows 95 GUI looks very little like
Windows 3.1, and their graphical shell and various GUI interface
elements draw from the Mac and Amiga GUIs.

Dave Haynie          | ex-Commodore Engineering |   for DiskSalv 3 &
Sr. Systems Engineer |  Hardwired Media Company | "The Deathbed Vigil"
Scala Inc., US R&D   |    Ki No Kawa Aikido     |     info@iam.com

	     "Feeling ... Pretty ... Psyched" -R.E.M.