Toaster Dealer
Ooops! – Not true! Don't forget O/S-2. It is mutli-tasking, but since MS
did the original version, they REALLY messed it up, I believe, on purpose
so that theyhad time to get Windows out and grab a major market share
before O/S-2 could do anythign useful. That is what caused the "divorce"
between IBM and Billy Gates.
O/S-2 is actually a multi-taskig scheme that uses demand page swapping a
la MVS or other IBM mainframe OS's. The trouble is the segmentation of
the Intel addressing design, the paging overhead and all the memory
protection stuff puts such a burden on the beasty that you need 4 megs of
memory just for the OS to load and another 4 megs to do anythng useful.
And one shouldn't expect much performance on it with less than a 30Mhz
'386 chip set either.
Don't get me wrong – PeeCee's can multitask – it just aint pretty or fun.
It will be along time before the PeeCees can do it with the same basic
facility (vis-a-vis day to day usefulness) and speed as AmigaDos, however.
wmc – via Autopilot!