Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!tcdcs!maths.tcd.ie!gwills
From: gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: UNIX is yuck (was Re: Next intro...)
Message-ID: <1990Oct22.094121.27487@maths.tcd.ie>
Date: 22 Oct 90 09:41:21 GMT
References: <4873@crash.cts.com>
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Lines: 18

In article <4873@crash.cts.com> seanc@pro-party.cts.com (Sean Cunningham) writes:
>Mac's intuitiveness...and may reach that before the MacOS gets preemptive
>multitasking or VM (VM may be coming in Sys7, but not m-tasking).

It's a funny thing, but do all UNIX people think that preemptive multitasking
is the one true multitasking, and all other forms are excrement ?

I mean, what's the difference for the average user ?

As far as I can see it, the main difference is in *favour* of cooperative mt
as opposed to preemptive.  I preemptive, you never know when your program is going to be swapped out for a while and while this is fine for some applications
(Who cares if a compile or a spreadsheet re-calc gets slowed down randomly), it
is absolutely *lousy* for dynamic graphical programs.  In the preemptive world,
a bouncing ball is more likely to jerk madly than glide, even though it only needs a little time every so often. However I'm able to play arcade-style games
without massive awfulness while my MPW program gets compiled and linked.  In
contrast, try playing WARP on a UNIX machine with a compile going on ....

Graham Wills.