840445m@aucs.UUCP (Mic Mac) (02/13/89)
This is in reply to the fellow who wanted a nice simple example of why a multitasking Amiga blows the doors off of other machines: You have called up a BBS in (some far away place) to download a PD game. The game is very large and you expect it to take 20 minutes or so. You realize that the long distance charges for the call will be expensive, but you want the game so you will make the call. After 20 minutes of transferring, the system tells you that your disk is full. On most machines, you have to abort, get a new disk and try again, thus wasting the money on that 20 minutes worth of phone call. Luckily, those of us with *TRUE* multitasking machines like the Amiga just have to call up a CLI, delete a few files, then click on the 'RETRY' button in which case the transfer continues where it left off. The only time wasted is the time it takes to delete a few unwanted files (2 minutes worse case) instead of wasting the whole 20 minutes of LD time. How's that? -- % Alan W. McKay % % % Acadia University % " The world needs more Socrates' % % Wolfville N.S. % walking the streets today " % % CANADA % - S. Corbett %
perley@trub.steinmetz (Donald P Perley) (02/14/89)
In article <1564@aucs.UUCP> 840445m@aucs.UUCP (Mic Mac) writes: >You have called up a BBS in (some far away place) to download a PD game. The >game is very large and you expect it to take 20 minutes or so. You realize >that the long distance charges for the call will be expensive, but you want >the game so you will make the call. > >After 20 minutes of transferring, the system tells you that your disk is full. >On most machines, you have to abort, get a new disk and try again, thus wasting >the money on that 20 minutes worth of phone call. Luckily, those of us with >*TRUE* multitasking machines like the Amiga just have to call up a CLI, delete >a few files, then click on the 'RETRY' button in which case the transfer >continues where it left off. >How's that? Not so good. The downloading process is just sitting there not doing anything while you search around for some more space. That sounds like a good candidate for multifinder on a mac. A good comm program on msdos might be programmed to let you do this too. It is a good part of a good example though. Lets say that you also want to compile some mongo program like mg (which takes about 1/2 hour even with a hard drive)... And you want to print the documentation for the game, which you downloaded first... And you really should be spending your time writing a paper or doing the graphics for a presentation. Of these, the printing, the download, and the editing don't really use much of the CPU time, and can run together without even slowing each other down. The compile is a CPU hog, but if you run that one at reduced priority it will just use whatever it can get without impacting the other tasks. It will still probably get most of the cpu. Now you have 4 programs that appear to be progressing simultaneously. Oh yeah... while you are at it, have the computer play some tunes. -don perley