Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!uunet!sjsca4!poffen
From: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Why use MS-window ?
Message-ID: <1990Jun5.151304.27057@sj.ate.slb.com>
Date: 5 Jun 90 15:13:04 GMT
References: <404@newave.UUCP> <10509@ingr.com> <54985@microsoft.UUCP> <1990Jun4.144158.22800@sj.ate.slb.com> <21855@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
Organization: Schlumberger Technologies, San Jose, CA.
Lines: 45

In article <21855@boulder.Colorado.EDU> wallwey@snoopy.Colorado.EDU (WALLWEY DEAN WILLIAM) writes:
>
>There is not neccessarily a large hit at all if the OS is designed right. 
>The previous example about pagemaker is very good.  Granted a proccessor can
>only do x amount in x time but how you distribute that HIT (example-printing)
>is very important.  In
>PageMaker for OS/2, when you print something, it creates a low priority
>thread to do it.  That way you can go on doing your work as usuall.
>While the computer is waiting for you to type more, it can be 'printing'
>in the background, but at soon as you hit a key, the main pagemaker
>thread comes into action.  After a couple of (relatively) 100s
>instructions when the kerstroke is proccessed, page maker can return
>back to the print thread which requires (relatively) 100s of thousands
>of instructions. The small time required to proccess the keystroke is
>practically nill in light of how much work must be done to printout a
>page. So your page takes an aditional 3 seconds to printout--almost nothing
>in light of how long it takes to print out Pagemaker docs.  On the other
>hand if it takes 1/2 second after every keystroke to get a responce, you
>can obviously see the degration.  This is what makes OS/2 so great and
>Windows so bad!  Even though in theory there is the same amount of
>degration on both, for practical purposes there is no degration of OS/2
>in certain cases.  EACH TASK DOES NOT RUN SLOWER, ONLY SOME DO, when you
>increase the number of tasks! To find out more on the subject, see
>Charles Petzold's article in one of the latest PC Magazines.
>(This is actually where I got the Pagemaker example!)
>
>	-Dean Wallwey 


True, the amount of degradation depends entirely on the mix of applications. I
was stating that the original post was erroneous in the general sense. When I
think of multitasking, I think of multiple compiles and other CPU/DISK/IO
intensive things (that is what I do all day on my Sun 4/370). When running
multiple tasks of this nature, each task will DEFINITELY take longer than if
run alone, however the total time taken is almost always less than the sum
of the two runs separately. This is what makes a true multitasking OS
preferable.

Now I wish I could get a good BSD Unix for my PC.


Russ Poffenberger               DOMAIN: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com
Schlumberger Technologies       UUCP:   {uunet,decwrl,amdahl}!sjsca4!poffen
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