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From: rubinoff@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Robert Rubinoff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: PPC, IAC, and True Multitasking (tm)
Message-ID: <28934@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 28 Aug 90 22:12:45 GMT
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Reply-To: rubinoff@linc.cis.upenn.edu.UUCP (Robert Rubinoff)
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even though it's a "pre-emptive multitasking" system]

This is sort of off the subject, but I feel obliged to mention that CMS is
actually *not* a multitasking operating system.  It's a single user operating
system, so you can only run one program at a time.  *VM* provides pre-emptive
multitasking, but VM isn't really an operating system in the conventional
sense; it's a virtual machine system.  Thus many people can each be running CMS
indepedently under VM at the same time, but each CMS virtual machine can only
run one process at a time.  If you want to be able to run multiple processes
simultaneously, you have to run a multitasking OS under VM.

This, of course, has nothing to do with the MAC; I just didn't want people to
think that VM/CMS was a sample of what pre-emptive multitasking was like.

   Robert