Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!unido!gmdzi!strobl From: strobl@gmdzi.UUCP (Wolfgang Strobl) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Rumor -> Loss of Mac's 20% advantage over Windows 3.0 Message-ID: <3095@gmdzi.UUCP> Date: 13 Jul 90 18:13:58 GMT References: <1915@runxtsa.runx.oz.au> <3871@newton.physics.purdue.edu> <3053@gmdzi.UUCP> <3881@newton.physics.purdue.edu> Organization: GMD, Sankt Augustin, F. R. Germany Lines: 54 sho@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu (Sho Kuwamoto) writes: >In article <3053@gmdzi.UUCP> strobl@gmdzi.UUCP (Wolfgang Strobl) writes: >>Sorry, I don't know what cdev's are. "TSR" is of course the (in)famous >>Terminate and Stay Resident routine. What does a cdev do, and what >>is it used for? >A cdev is a control panel device. The control panel is used by the >user to control aspects of the mac's behavior. Key repeat time, mouse >speed, etc. For a number of years now, the control panel has been >modular. It is relatively simple to write a module for the control >panel when appropriate. It is common to use the control panel to >control the functionality of an init. For example, my screen blanker >can be set through my control panel. I can tell it how long to wait >until blanking the screen, etc. This is a minor point, but it's just >one thing I happened to find annoying on PCs running DOS. If I wanted >to change the behavior of a TSR, I had to remember what key sequence >would pop up the menu for that TSR. Having a modular control panel is a nice thing. I prefer to have the intialization/configuration bound to the application itself (remember: almost everything is an application under Windows). And, please, don't compare the Mac to a PC without Windows. This is unfair. >>... >This sounds very similar to how it's done on the mac. >>... >This does as well. But that was my point: I was arguing against the statment that Windows has an inferior and completely different architecture. Both the user interface and the interface to the programmer are different, but both architectures share a lot of concepts. >>The important point here is that the code of a DLL is shared >>by all running applications which use it. Windows itself is a >>collection of such DLL's. Printer drivers are DLL's >>with a known set of entry points. Many major applications >>consist of a set of DLL's and one ore more programs using >>these DLL's. >We don't have any sort of dynamic linking on the mac, but then again, >all the windowing routines are in ROM, so it's not real important. But the printer drivers, for example, are not in ROM. Wolfgang Strobl #include