Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!cc.tut.fi!cc.tut.fi!n67786 From: n67786@cc.tut.fi (Tero Nieminen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: Copying files in the backround of sys 7 Message-ID: Date: 14 Apr 91 08:49:55 GMT References: <1991Apr10.141322.25903@ifi.uio.no> <1991Apr10.223846.16355@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1991Apr12.221121.29670@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <1991Apr13.180850.21255@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Sender: n67786@cc.tut.fi (Tero Nieminen) Organization: Tampere Univ. of Technology, Finland. Lines: 30 In-Reply-To: dawg6844@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu's message of 13 Apr 91 18:08:50 GMT In article <1991Apr13.180850.21255@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> dawg6844@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Race Bannon) writes: Yes, but do you WANT to be able to 'do' something while its formatting? There's nothing strange there. Of cource we want to keep working while the Mac is doing something. Another thing is will it allow us.. Formatting sucks a tremendous amount of cycles. I suspect that your cursor would be so jerky that it would be hard to accomplish anything anyway. Flacky desing, nothing more. It's so reliefing to know that all the MIPS or whatever that my new and shiny $8000 FX is doing such a "tremendous" work in formating floppies. One might be tempted to wish for something more. What someone needs to invent is a small device that formats floppies. Then you could do boxes and boxes of them without tying up your machine. They have done it allready, and they are called Macintoshes. Just buy a bunch of them and you'll be able to do other thing meanwhile. Did anyone ever make more versatile floppy formatter? Ok. Enough tongue in cheek for now, but it's rather unbelievable that Apple has not come up with a reasonable way of not tying up Mac while formating floppies. It's about high time Apple made something about it. Like it wouldn't be bad enough that HD transfers reguire cpu polling all the time, when most other manufacturers have DMA for just that. -- Tero Nieminen Tampere University of Technology n67786@cc.tut.fi Tampere, Finland, Europe