Xref: utzoo comp.sys.atari.st:7064 comp.sys.amiga:13423
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!cbosgd!ihnp4!ihlpg!tainter
From: tainter@ihlpg.ATT.COM (Tainter)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Multi-tasking? A nightmare...
Message-ID: <4645@ihlpg.ATT.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 88 16:48:36 GMT
References: <2027@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk> <1378@husc2.UUCP> <492@.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 41

In article <492@.UUCP>, alex@.UUCP (Alex Laney) writes:
> 
>In article <2027@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk> pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee) writes:
>> I can't think of *any* two tasks which I do on  my  home  machine
>> which  take  enough  time to make m/p profitable, and which could
>> co-exist sensibly with only two floppy drives.

I have one application I ran into at home on  one  of  my  single
processing  machines.   I was dissassembling a rather large piece
of code to find references to a particular set of routines.   The
disassembly  output  was many times as large as my available disk
space put the references I needed were quite small.  If  I  could
have  piped  (UNIX  terminology  for  sending  the  output of one
process directly into the input of another process)  this  output
into  a grep (a line oriented regular expression pattern matcher)
I would not have run into disk problems  and would not  have  had
to manually subdivide this work.

Clearly, since he doesn't have support for it he isn't doing some
of  the tasks he could be doing.  Daemons for many purposes could
be  'in  the  background'.    Print   spooling,   disk   capacity
monitoring,     memory     consolidaters,    memory    allocation
precalculators and well as piping.


Note:  One of the fun things one can do with pipelines is send  a
chunk   of   text   from  inside a wordprocessor/editor through a
formatting program as I have done with this message.

> What about formatting a floppy while you are running  your  Word-
> Processor, and your floppy is full? What I like is the ability in
> Multi-tasking systems, is the ability to SUSPEND,  and  not  just
> ABORT a program, when I need to interrupt.

Actually, this  doesn't  take  multiprocessing  (i.e.  concurrent
running  processes).  To do it in the general case it does or one
of the kludges like memory resident programs.

> Alex Laney   alex@xicom.UUCP   ...utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!xios!xicom!alex

--j.a.tainter