john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell) (12/23/87)
(In the spirit of Christmas I'm limiting this to the Amiga group.) Smee writes: >What I am questioning is TRUE multi-tasking. See my .sig. From your use of this buzz-word I surmise you don't own an Amiga. >BACKGROUND COMPILATION NEEDS LIBRARY DISK >PLEASE INSERT LIBRARY DISK INTO DRIVE B That's where 880K floppies come in handy (something I think most people have lost track of). Two days ago I filled up a work disk and made a new one. I copied 250K of libraries, utilities, script files, and so on into several levels of directories. This still gives me over 600K for what I create myself, which should do me a month or two, and the average home user more than a year! If you want to keep things seperate you need a floppy devoted to each major application. If you have smaller needs, you can wordprocess, compile, and a few other things off the same properly divided disk. I also recently catalogued my disks... feels kind of funny seeing a disk that I'd put in storage because "it was getting full" and seeing > 200K free on it. You just get so used to having all that (memory | disk) space that you don't appreciate how much it really represents. Plain text in this scheme takes up virtually no space at all, last time I filled up a disk of text files I just deleted 400K worth of editors I didn't use any more. >I emphasize that I think this present group is unrepresentative, and very >much a minority. On some issues, such as "my 10 gigabyte HD doesn't transfer at full SCSI speed" I'll agree with you. But multitasking is something that, although you may not appreciate it at first, when it really hits you you're addicted for life. Most of the advantages of multitasking, 'tis true, only really show up if you know what you're doing and how to do it... if it takes 5 minutes to look up some feature in a manual, it doesn't mean anything that your program has been sitting there ready to multitask for 5 minutes while something else was actually running. But this is not to say that Mr. Average won't ever become a power-user, and certainly if his kids have any interest at all they'll find out soon enough how to put multitasking to work for them (1). I suppose almost any m/t'ing program could be though of as an interrupt-driven routine, or else as a program sitting suspended until you activated it. This has led to confusion on machines which make much use of these types of features (eg IBM -- will my FOO utility work while BAR application is running, C64 -- almost anything serious either forces a reboot or will foul up any interrupt or wedge coding (2)). But on the Amiga? Every program you write has all this marvelous interrupt handling, CPU-sharing facility built in; a 10 year old can write a Basic program to serve as a background print spooler. -- 1. The kids of today are the first generation that will have access to major computing power while growing up. Think how far this one got starting out with Altairs and (more my time) C64's. 2. I'm reminded here of the many messages on the Atari group that say "such-and such won't work with GDOS installed", or ask "will it break the 40 folder fix" and detailing the limitations of the various desk accessories. Note it isn't a flame, it's just a very noticeable point of irritation for many Atari owners. -- So you have it both ways -- as a programmer every program you write is some sort of super-Norton-utility. As a user, each program running (depending on the skill of the programmer) has a surplus of flexibility which is mainly of benefit in a multitasking environment. See how much software on other machines takes over the screen (eg Atari) or freezes everything else while a particular hotkey or interrupt utility is in heavy use (both IBM and Atari). Someone writes a program like that on the Amiga, they get flamed because people have firm ideas about the freedom they want. John -- "The Amiga doesn't really multitask because... because... because when two programs try to write to the printer at the same time, it crashes!" -- who WAS that masked ST owner? (honest to God this is what he thinks)