CompuServe Messages

Once you told me you pondered writing a book or a story about how the Intel architecture has crippled computing… I *know* the problems, too – but I looked forward to a wider scope and analysis of what this did to programming talent, and tools for consumers. As for the 33 vs 66 Mhz rates, I found the 66ers to feel about 10-20 percent faster than a true 486/33, subjectively. One Windows brick wall I've encountered recently is the 8K handle limit. There's a fixed table of handles. When you run out, when the system's used some, other apps used some, your app used some, then you can't move at all under Windows. ("Handles" are used for almost everything in Windows – opening a window, drawing into it, allocating pieces of memory, etc. By comparison, you can perform endless memory allocations of any size under AmigaDOS – you can't "run out" of memory allocations before you run out of physical memory. In InterChange Plus, we might make more than 50,000 allocations to perform a conversion.) So, any application that wants to make lots of little allocations if *forced8 to add another layer of insulation between itself and the operating system, to make its own memory manager.