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From: toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Multitasking GS?
Message-ID: <13271@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 15 Jan 90 01:09:06 GMT
References: <6456.apple_ii.info-apple@pro-graphics>
Sender: news@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
Reply-To: toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (Todd P. Whitesel)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 36

In article <6456.apple_ii.info-apple@pro-graphics> davep@pro-graphics.cts.com (David Pirmann) writes:

>A multitasking GS would be nice.  I don't believe such a thing exists (modem
>transfers in the bkground, Appleworks in the foreground).  It would be nice,
>but highly unlikely.  

Applications like AWGS (pollywogs!) should easily be able to handle simple
multitasking, since they all use the same event loop and most of the time your
background tasks are all interrupt driven anyway. (With the event loop
structure it is easy to code in the rest.)

But that's just for one application. Believe it or not, the //gs is currently a
more robust _environment_ for mulititasking than MultiFinder. To wit:

	1) gs toolbox has built in global message center. Mac does not.
	2) gs has TaskMaster to handle system events. Mac does not.

I hope both of these appear in the Mac soon. Desktop programming is bad enough
already. They waited too long to give the gs a resource manager.

However, no one has tried to implement such a beast on the gs yet, for obvious
reasons. MultiFinder on the Mac was hell, and even with the hindsight from that
put into the gs toolbox it could get pretty hairy. I contend that this is more
the fault of Apple's o/s architecture than anything else.

MultiFinder gs, I believe, is doable, maybe desirable, but it would force us to
go to two megs just to use it. Most gs owners don't have that kind of money
(though prices _are_ dropping!) and I suspect most of us can get along without
a MultiFinder, as we've been doing so for a while.

But I _would_ like having the option.

What I would also like is in the next post, and deserves its own topic.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu