Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!SUN.MCS.CLARKSON.EDU!mrd
From: mrd@SUN.MCS.CLARKSON.EDU ("Michael R. DeCorte")
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Multi-tasking? A nightmare...
Message-ID: <8801121916.AA08165@sun.mcs.clarkson.edu>
Date: 12 Jan 88 19:16:21 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 37

In article <3279@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> davidli@umn-cs.UUCP (Dave Meile) writes:
>
> But I still insist that, for the non "power user" there's no need for it.
>
>-- Dave Meile

Let me describe this morning.  I am using a Sun 3/50.  From this 3/50
I am rlogged into two sun servers, an alliant, and a gould 9080 (all
unix 3.x), on one of the servers. I was runing Gnu emacs reading my
mail and recieved a request to 'talk'(electronic talk) to a user.  I
threw gnu into the background, and ran talk; the user told me that TeX
wasn't processing a file properly.  I thew talk into the background;
grabbed the file and ran TeX on it in the background.  While waiting
for it to TeX I resumed talking to the individual asking assorted
questions.  When TeX was done I put talk in the background again and
read the log file and saw no error so I ran dvi2ps on it in the backgound
and found out when I started talking with the user again that
he actully was talking about dvi2ps not TeX.  So I stopped talk again,
read the output from dvi2ps and found that a font was missing at the proper
mag step.  I told the user to wait about 15 minutes and everything
would be fine.  I then ran metafont then gftopk then cp all in the
background while I resumed reading my mail.  

Now I don't know about you, but I would hate to have to do this with
some little os that doesn't do multi-tasking easily. The above
sequence took about 5 minutes of my time; if I did not have
multi-tasking it would have taken at least 1/2 hour.Ok I guess that
you could call this "power use" but I assume that people don't want
toy computers, right?  Please saying that multi-tasking is not needed
is sort of like saying you don't need hard-drives; sure you can do just
about everthing that you want but would you even want to?



Michael DeCorte
mrd@clutx.clarkson.edu
mrd@clutx.bitnet