ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer) (12/23/87)
In article <3279@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> davidli@umn-cs.UUCP (Dave Meile) writes: >But I still insist that, for the non "power user" there's no need for it. Ok, fine... Assume Joe Average buys an Amiga and never ever explicitly uses multitasking. Ie, he never runs more than one program at a given time. What does he lose by buying an Amiga? An extremely small percentage of CPU, totally negligible. I don't think anyone will argue that Joe is paying extra for multitasking. What does he gain? Well, probably nothing overall... But, he does now have ability to move/drag/arrange windows, pull down and examine menus, click on buttons, all while he might be doing some CPU-intensive operation (like reformatting a document). On the Mac, for instance, your mouse loses it's ability to drag windows at certain times, and I've seen users wonder why... (Don't tell me that "average users" do not want to fiddle around with windows and their mice. Especially when they're waiting for some operation to finish.) On the other end of the spectrum, you have the programmers, and I think you've seen examples of how heavily they use multitasking in the many messages posted in the last few days. Both during development as a tool and in their programs as a means with which to write cleaner applications. So, David, there's nothing wrong with having multitasking on your home machine. People who understand it and who like it will use it, and people who don't know about it or who don't care about it, won't. The OS and applications might use it behind the user's back to improve overall performance, but that's invisible to the users. And if we're talking about the Amiga, then, even if the user doesn't use the multitasking explicitly, he or she still has a machine that is very powerful for it's price range. If you think the lack of multitasking would make the Amiga a better machine, then please explain why. Wouldn't it be nice if the ST were to suddenly become a multitasking machine without losing it's ability to run all existing applications and without any penalties on performance/price? Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu