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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Multitasking and interactivity issu
Message-ID: <126900151@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 90 22:30:00 GMT
References: <105048@<1990Jan13>
Lines: 27
Nf-ID: #R:<1990Jan13:105048:p.cs.uiuc.edu:126900151:000:1414
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jan 23 16:30:00 1990


Mitchell, after talking to you through email, I thinkit is pretty
clear you are ignorant of the way the macintosh is designed.  I wish
you'd go back to reading comp.sys.amiga.


The base note is very insightful -- it is exactly what I have said to
others on many occasions.  The macintosh is an interactive computer.
The purpose of an interactive machine is to interact with the user in
better ways, not to spend time trying to do a zillion things behind
that person's back.  Multifinder is an unqualified success in that
respect.  People criticize Apple for not adding multitasking to
multifinder, but Apple understands that the development effort is
better spent enhancing the interactive portions (sound, color,
postscript), than enhancing the lives of applications programmers (who
already have the tools they need to write some of the best editors on
any computer ever invented).

If you want to do background number crunching, or run batch JCL
languages, by all means, buy an IBM mainframe (or an amiga) and enjoy.

One nice thing about the macintosh is that the single-processing
aspect eliminates the race conditions that crop up frequently in many
multitasking windowing environments.  I've seen people mouse-down on
an object right before a background task takes it off the screen,
leaving them with their finger on the detonator of a time bomb.  This
sort of thing cannot happen in a macintosh program.