Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!tw-rnd!johnl
From: johnl@tw-rnd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (John Lindwall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Multitasking on the ST
Message-ID: <471@tw-rnd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 8 Aug 89 00:47:21 GMT
References: <8908021826.AA05333@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <15627@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <652@opal.tubopal.UUCP>
Reply-To: johnl@tw-rnd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (John Lindwall)
Organization: NCR Distributed Systems Laboratory
Lines: 20

In article <652@opal.tubopal.UUCP> alderaan@tubopal.UUCP (Thomas Cervera) writes:
>
>  What's all this about MultiTasking on the ST ? You don't have a MMU (not
>really and I think that's the worst failure in the ST's hardware architechture),
>so you are definetely not able to run a *secure* multitasking on this machine
>even if you want to - basta. All what you can call protected memory inside the 
>ST is a bunch of bytes at the bottom plus the hardware registers - that's it.
>  If you want to realize reasonable memory segmentation (in my experience this
>is essential for TimeSharing) you MUST have a MMU.
>

Amen to that! Amiga owners have suffered with the lack of an MMU.  The
usefulness multitasking is a given, IMO.  The security of Amiga's multitasking
is poor due to the lack of memory protection supplied by an MMU.  Those of
you who agree multitasking is useful, and would like to see it on an Atari:
Demand it from Atari and demand MMU support as well.

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	"Above opinions are my own, not my employer's"
John Lindwall				 johnl@tw-rnd.SanDiego.NCR.COM