Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc Subject: Re: Iconitis Message-ID: <3845@ficc.uu.net> Date: 13 Apr 89 12:48:18 GMT References: <1930@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <11555@lanl.gov> <17376@cisunx.UUCP> <28834@apple.Apple.COM> Organization: Xenix Support Lines: 32 In article <28834@apple.Apple.COM>, austing@Apple.COM (Glenn L. Austin) writes: > Running in the background is alien to the Mac and Windows?!? You you'd better > let the authors of the background print spoolers know... Oh yes, you write a program that looks like a device driver and claim that it's just another program running in the background. Gack. You can not take a random Macintosh program and stick it in th background. It's tied to GetNextEvent. When you can run a compile concurrently with Photon Paint then you can make the claim that the Mac supports background processing. I've been able to do that on the Amiga for years. Even before I got my RAM expanded, though I couldn't actually compile and run Deluxe Paint together in 512K. Now with plenty of RAM I can compile a program while using Photon or Deluxe Paint to work on the imagery... without really slowing the compile down, since the program isn't busy-waiting on GetNextEvent. It's limited by my speed. Even with 512K Deluxe Paint got along fine with all manner of programs. Plain, ordinary, programs that don't require learning a whole new paradigm. Because on the Amiga, as on UNIX, the operating system handles time-slicing. Your program can completely ignore the user interface, sit on the CPU as long as it wants, and the system will happily chug along. If you guys had written a decent conventional O/S for the Mac and stuck the user interface on top of it I'd be using it now instead. -- Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Personal: ...!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.