Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Why call it Windows/286?
Message-ID: <13659@ncoast.ORG>
Date: 20 May 89 14:49:02 GMT
References: <89May12.000432edt.19614@me.utoronto.ca> <5723@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.windows.ms
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 37

As quoted from <5723@microsoft.UUCP> by paulc@microsoft.UUCP (Paul Canniff 2/1011):
+---------------
| In article <89May12.000432edt.19614@me.utoronto.ca> yap@me.utoronto.ca (Davin Yap) writes:
| >Okay.  I give up.  Why did Micro Soft (skull) call windows/286 what they
| >did when the beast doesn't use the protected mode of the 286 to provide
| >pre-emptive multitasking?  It runs just the same on a '86 machine?
| 
| To differentiaite it from Win386, of course.
> ...
| >PS:  Isn't there a law against this?
| 
| No, you can post anything you want, no matter how trivial.
+---------------

(miscellaneous bleating deleted)

Every time I start to regain some faith in the Usenet, some jerk comes along
and flames it away.  Sigh.

It's called "Windows/286" because it's Microsoft's contention that an 8088
doesn't have the speed to run it properly.

I tried it on an 8088 once.  Guess what?  They're right.  It's faster to do
it with pencil and paper.

If you want to multitask an 8088, use Desqview or something else that
isn't a graphics environment.  Graphics is *always* the killer.  (The machines
that avoid this have blitters or similar dedicated graphics hardware:  Suns,
Atari ST, Amiga (I think), Next, etc.  [And, for the curious:  the Mac
*doesn't*.  Which is why Apple is pushing 68030 boxes now.])

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery@ncoast.org
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