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From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: advice please - Atari-ST or Amiga
Message-ID: <1991Feb13.230325.2790@math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 13 Feb 91 23:03:25 GMT
References: <1991Feb6.163205.6683@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1991Feb6.205829.2142@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> <26769@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>
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Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
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Shoulda known when I started getting behind in this newsgroup it was
'cause a flame war was going on, nothing else ever generates nearly
as much traffic...    }-)

In article <26769@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> cr1@beach.cis.ufl.edu () writes:
>Here again is the words of someone who has never had a multitasking
>machine. First of all, the Amiga OS multitasks, but that is probably
>what you meant.  You can't 'add on' multitasking to the ST, so stop
>decieving this poor guy who is trying to find out information.  You
>can use things like Revolver to stop one memory partition and switch
>to another. this is not multitasking because you are doing one thing.
>YOu can use things like Masterlink (hahaha...if they ever come out
>with another version) to download in the backround, but that is pretty
>much the extent of it.  You are alwasy very limited.  And don't breath
>to hard while you are doing this, you might crash it!

You're really confused here. There is nothing in the ST hardware that
prevents it from multitasking. You can add various hooks into the ST
OS to allow pre-emptive multitasking. That's what MicroRTX does, or
MiNT, or MX2. All of these packages work, though they present varying
degrees of Unix-flavor. Contrary to your belief, this is real multitasking,
and all three of these programs maintain TOS compatibility. It's not
very thrilling on an 8MHz 68000, but it works.
--
  -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan

Flame all you want - we'll take more.