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From: ralphw@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Multitasking GS?
Message-ID: <1893@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 9 Jun 88 20:28:34 GMT
References: <8Wf-=Jy00V4McuU0C4@andrew.cmu.edu> <8048@brl-smoke.ARPA>
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In article <8048@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <8Wf-=Jy00V4McuU0C4@andrew.cmu.edu> jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jeremy G. Mereness) writes:
>>It would take a lot of memory, but its possible, isn't it?
>
>....  The memory manager takes care of parceling out chunks
>of memory so that several applications could in theory be coresident.
>However, many of them are "poor memory citizens" and hog all available
>memory when they start up, preculding any further program loading
>until they terminate.

This can be fixed by telling the memory manager to 'lie' and only
give out for 'reasonable' sized parcels.  Of course, if you have no
way of knowing which program is asking for something, you need to be able to
guard against one program asking for all the memory a little bit at a time.
The Switcher and Multifinder systems for the Mac must have some way
of doing this, since the Mac wasn't designed to multitask either.


-- 
					- Ralph W. Hyre, Jr.

Internet: ralphw@ius2.cs.cmu.edu    Phone:(412)268-{2847,3275} CMU-{BUGS,DARK}
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