Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Macintosh OS Message-ID: Date: 5 Jun 90 17:55:37 GMT References: <1990May30.230248.6200@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <1935@key.COM> <30273@ut-emx.UUCP> <76700207@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <402@newave.UUCP> <1990Jun2.132847.14292@oracle.com> <26437.266ae612@vaxb.acs.unt.edu> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 32 I said: an O/S is basically a resource manager, and CPU time is one of the most important resources. In article <26437.266ae612@vaxb.acs.unt.edu> ac08@vaxb.acs.unt.edu writes: > Oh, yeah, real important. For most small (single-user) machines, the CPU is > really "working" at about 1% of capacity... and the few times it's up > to that capacity, it's usually doing something to interface with a user... The fact that you have a lot of CPU time to manage, or a little, is pretty much irrelevant. The point is that it's got to be allocated. On the Mac this is done by hand, by each and every application program. Some programs are specially written to do a better job of this... these are called Desk Accessories. they have to stay in memory all the time, or you don't have them available. That's why, on the Mac... > People run out of memory a lot more than they > "peg the needle" with the CPU... ... and on the IBM-PC, too. Because to have a program available at short notice it has to be pretty much loaded at boot time. Or you have to load a kludgey context switcher that requires you pre-allocate memory. The reason the Mac chews memory is that it doesn't have... > And those preemptive multitasking systems > suck RAM like nobody's business... Nope. They free it, by making all your tools available at any time, whether the guy who wrote the application you're using was a good programmer or a mediocre one. I still have a 512K Amiga 1000, and it's still got more horsepower left over for *me* than your multimeg Mac-II-whatever. Remember... time is not conserved. Memory is. -- `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. 'U` Have you hugged your wolf today? @FIN Dirty words: Zhghnyyl erphefvir vayvar shapgvbaf.