Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!cmcl2!esquire!baumgart From: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: All about sys 7.0 Message-ID: Date: 27 Mar 91 22:26:32 GMT References: <1991Mar21.095051.29206@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <593@genco.bungi.com> <91085.161852EHYOUNK@MTUS5.BITNET> Sender: news@DPW.COM Organization: Davis Polk & Wardwell Lines: 58 In-reply-to: EHYOUNK@MTUS5.BITNET's message of 26 Mar 91 21:18:52 GMT In article <91085.161852EHYOUNK@MTUS5.BITNET> EHYOUNK@MTUS5.BITNET writes: I completly agree with the statement that Mac OS should have prementive multitasking.. Multifinder is a joke, they is no way to download from a modem while running another app. Here are some other problems. It would be nice if people at least *tried* things before posting. Of course you can download and work on something else at the same time. I do it all the time. I also have a Gifwatcher window open (it displays a GIF file as it's being downloaded), and sometimes I even run MacCompress in the background to decompress a bunch of text files. All works as expected. Would you mind telling us which programs you're talking about? All the commercial comm programs work in the background; ZTerm (shareware) does; I can't think of any others right now. Probably there's one out there. If it doesn't work in the background, it's broken, and I wouldn't use it. 1. There is no way to set a task's inportance, each other the backgroud app's get equal time, except for the foreground app, witch can steel all of the cpu time if it wants too. I like this. It means my word processor doesn't slow down just because I'm running a compile or uncompressing a bunch of files. On my Sun 4 at work (with 20 megs of memory), I usually run my compiles on another machine, since my emacs session becomes very unresponsive when anything major is going on in the background. 2. What about all those nice coprossers the fx has. When will we see a system that truely supports them! The ADB and serial coprocessors are already supported. Which were you referring to? I hope you're not talking about multi-processing in general -- there are few systems in the world that support multi-processing well, and none are personal computers like the Mac. 3. When will we see the new print architechure, line-layout manager, and apple scripting. Good question. I suspect it's in the works, though it's a shame it won't all be in System 7 as originally promised. But there are so many good things in System 7 that I can understand why Apple wanted to get it out the door and into people's hands as soon as possible. I had heard that DDE in Windows 3.1 was going to work over networks; now I hear that that's planned for a future release. Apple's publish/subscribe manager works locally or across a net, whether or not all the applications are running. When will we see that from Microsoft? -- Steve Baumgarten | "New York... when civilization falls apart, Davis Polk & Wardwell | remember, we were way ahead of you." baumgart@esquire.dpw.com | cmcl2!esquire!baumgart | - David Letterman