Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!shelby!polya!ali
From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Apple System 7.0
Message-ID: <9268@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 18 May 89 15:25:10 GMT
References: <6864@cbmvax.UUCP> <129000002@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: Ali T. Ozer <ali@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: aozer@NeXT.com (Ali Ozer)
Organization: .
Lines: 19

In article <129000002@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>Multitasking is nearly useless for interactive work (spreadsheet / word
>processing / digital darkroom / picture editing).

That's silly; haven't you ever been faced with a long computation (spreadsheet
recalc, digital darkroom edge detect, etc --- a computation that might take
15+ seconds) during which time you would've wanted to go into another program
a do something else without putting the first to sleep? I do that all time
on the Amiga & NeXT machines. On the Mac, you can't, unless the first program
has that "kludgy" (your words) mechanism for background processing.

>I admit the mac needs a good background ray-tracer.

There - you said it - unless someone adds that background processing to a 
program you want to use, you won't have the luxury of multitasking. In 
a multitasking environment,  you wouldn't need to worry if a program was 
written to properly background; all programs do.

Ali