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To: Charles Hughes who wrote (16819)	1/27/1998 6:07:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 24154

This preemptive multitasking thing brings up a point on "windows" heritage. When MS Windows is call a clone of MacOS, the response is always "well, they both stole it from Xerox". My response is that the inheritance from MacOS to Windows is very clear and direct, with Word and Excel being developed first for MacOS, and then Windows3/ Word+Excell for Windows being co-developed. Xerox was a general influence, but not a direct model. But, the bigger point is that the Xerox people may not have known how to sell anything, but they knew something about computer systems that Apple and Microsoft chose to ignore when they adapted the fancy interface. Xerox did the first GUI, but they also did innovative work in the OS field, and published it. I muchly doubt that any of the Xerox systems had "cooperative multitasking" aka coroutines, synchronous file systems, and all the other 50's-era OS stuff that the PC guys had to reinvent before going on to '60s-era stuff like virtual memory. Of course, Apple loses here because they're still off flogging "cooperative multitasking" as a good idea, while Jobs decides whether Rhapsody is for real or not. Bill at least brought Cutler and his stolen DEC code on board to enter the modern era. Cheers

To: Charles Hughes who wrote (16819)	1/27/1998 7:00:00 PM
From: nommedeguerre	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Chaz, >>I think the reason it took so long on PCs was the processors and support bios didn't support it at first - too cheap. But since these machines started out with just a few K of memory and floppy disks, not hard disk, pre-emptive multitasking on PCs wasn't the first concern. Also, can you imagine the mayhem when programmers who had trouble with single thread DOS tried to right a well-behaved task! We did run RMX86 on Intel's 86/35 card which had almost all the same components as an IBM PC. Context-switching and interrupt latency were CPU hogs that's for sure, but it ran as solid as a rock. One system ran for over 5 years without a reset; probably still running unless hardware finally failed. If only Intel had understood the concept of bloatware... Take it easy, Norm