Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!rpi!leah!bingvaxu!bingsunm.cc.binghamton.edu!consp11 From: consp11@bingsunm.cc.binghamton.edu (Brett Kessler) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Multitasking vs MultiFinder (was Amy 68030 vs Mac IIcx) Keywords: Oranges are better than Apples. Message-ID: <3137@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> Date: 12 Mar 90 21:00:11 GMT References: Sender: usenet@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu Reply-To: consp11@bingsunm.cc.binghamton.edu (Brett Kessler) Organization: SUNY Binghamton Lines: 40 > [...] > Does AmyOs multitask as well as Multifinder? Are most Amy programs > pretty reliable when multi-tasking? > [...] This is the only question of the bunch that I can answer of the few you asked, but I must say, quite simply, that Apple's MultiFinder is a joke, basically because the hardware itself is still not capable of true multitasking. What the MultiFinder does is basically the same thing as the Mac cDEV called Switcher. It lets you swap out one program and swap in another, but ONLY ONE IS RUNNING AT ANY GIVEN TIME. The other one is put to "sleep" until it is switched back in. The Amiga, on the other hand, has the hardware support for true multitasking. There are custom chips for I/O, sound, graphics, etc., freeing up the CPU to do more, such as run more than one program at a time. As an example, do the following on both a Mac and an Amiga: Recalculate a large spreadsheet WHILE printing out a document WHILE downloading software via modem WHILE unarchiving some other software that was downloaded earlier WHILE editing a text file. MultiFinder can't do it. In fact, the printing alone will kill it (though a public-domain ImageWriter spooler init or cdev can get around that). And the software D/Ling kills it alone, too - if you switch away from the terminal program, it stops executing (ie: sending checksum information, etc.), making your D/L a useless, incomplete hunk of nothing. Not to mention the fact that the spreadsheet is no further along in its calculations since you switched out of it.... As for reliability while multitasking, I routinely do the above (minus the spreadsheet - I don't own one!) nearly every day, and haven't had a system crash in well over three months. Ah, well. Hope it helped. +------///-+------------------| BRETT KESSLER |------------------+-\\\------+ | /// | consp11@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu | \\\ | | \\\/// | consp11@bingvaxa.BITNET | \\\/// | | \XX/ | (PeopleLink) B.KESSLER | \XX/ | +----------+-----------------------------------------------------+----------+