bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) (01/20/90)
While multiprocessing includes things like doing a download while editing a different text file I think that using pipes is important and could probably be handled fairly easily. If you used a system where, for instance, different banks of memory were used for different utilities you could have the pointer to the text string being processed passed from one bank to another. I think that the main requirement would be memory rather than GS over 8 bit Apple, though the GS would probably have some advantages. I'm thinking along the lines of a competely new operating system with utilities written specifically for it. Trying to run "standard" Apple packages like Appleworks, etc. could present some problems that I just can't see getting around. It would take Apple introducing a Unix shell with published specs and then software authors following those specs to work. If you limited disk access to /ram-only while multitasking was turned on you could get around the problem of dealing with interupts during disk access. Now for my question. Since accellerators use caching to work would they help or hurt the process? Would it make thrashing a greater problem or is the caching done so quickly that it doesn't matter? Bob Church att!oucsace!bchurch