Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!ethz-inf!wyle
From: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Iconitis
Message-ID: <167@inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 14 Apr 89 14:14:06 GMT
References: <1930@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <11555@lanl.gov> <17376@cisunx.UUCP> <191@visix.UUCP> <3810@ficc.uu.net> <28834@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: wyle@ethz.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle)
Organization: Departement fuer Informatik, ETH Zuerich
Lines: 56

>>[ I was complaining about the lack of multitasking on the PC and MAC ]
>>> This is purely an operating system problem, its not related to the interface
>>> at all.
>>It's related to the interface, since most of what little O/S there is on the
>>Mac (and now with Windows and its successors, the PC) is entirely oriented
>>towards the user interface. You can't write a program on these machines
>>unless it's tied tightly to the user interface. The whole concept of running
>>in the background is alien.
>Running in the background is alien to the Mac and Windows?!?  Boy, you'd better
>let the authors of the background print spoolers know that so that they can
>fix their programs to run only in the foreground rather than in either the
>foreground or background, or background only in those two systems!  In fact,
>there is a program on the Mac that runs *ONLY* in the background under
>MultiFinder -- Backgrounder.  Guess what -- no user interface.  All it does is
>watch for print spool files and start up another program to manage the spool.

The original point is more subtle; there is no crontab in DOS or MacOS;
there are no daemons.  There is only poor programmer support for
background processing (get-next-event in mac-OS); OS/2 appears a
bit better in this regard.  Even the wonderful spooler in multi-finder
feels it must tell the user what's happening and creates the
print-monitor process.  The programs are *all* *HOMUNCULOUS*!!  We want
*true* background processing!  We want "daemon" support!  Consider this
Bourne-shell construct which has worked for 16 years, up through new
versions of Unix!


if test "$0" != "/bin/sh" ; then  # check if we're fork'd
  /bin/sh < $0 &                  # Fork ourself in background, leave
  exit 0
fi

# Child process:

while <something> ; do
  [....  do real work...]
  sleep 300
done

---------------------------------
Now do you get it?  Unix was born to run background processes; OS/2 is
getting there (though slowly).  Mac-OS is moving even more slowly
because the programming philosophy is so user-interface centered;
application writers must put special code into their programs which give
up the CPU; it should be the other way around.  MIND (by Greg Dudek) did
some great stuff with pre-multifinder mac-OS;  it was the closest
thing to a "true" background process I found.

BTW:  will mac-OS 6.0.4 (the "System" file) be larger than A/UX 1.1
      "/unix" file?  Inquiring mac-users want to know! ;-)

-Mitch
-- 
-Mitchell F. Wyle                         wyle@ethz.uucp
Institut fuer Informationssysteme         wyle@inf.ethz.ch
ETH Zentrum / 8092 Zurich, Switzerland    +41 1 256 5237