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> It's not that you don't notice the multitasking, it's that it is *not > important* for most users. It doesn't matter if multitasking is important to them or not, the lack of any operating system *at all* below the level of the GUI causes all kinds of effects that they can't help but notice. I'll be sitting there working on something, and the whole computer comes to a complete halt because some component I neither know nor care about, something that's not even visible on the screen, something that shouldn't even be in any critical path, decides it doesn't want to cooperate. When I point this out I get "that's OK, it came back after a couple of seconds, it's not like it crashed". No, it didn't crash. But that's JUST NOT ACCEPTABLE from (in this case) a G3/400 that's running *one* program, *no* third party extensions or patches other than the Sonnet extension. And it's not the Sonnet extension's fault, because I've had the same thing happening on an iMac G3/700 with a vanilla 9.2 install. Don't believe me? Just share files. "You may see some slowdown" it says. Hah! More like "your computer will periodically undergo "grand mal" seizures". OS X doesn't act like that. Yes, sometimes some program will put up a moded grab and I'll get a few seconds of lollypop in that app. VERY rarely, if I have a few dozen applications running and a backup going on > When you are browsing the web or reading email, it simply didn't matter. Like hell it didn't. The only reason it didn't was because someone spent a grand or two on their Mac and they'd lose face if they admitted even to themselves that under the covers the emperor had no clothes. And there's a lot of failures that people put down to memory protection that are obviously, when I watch them happen, scheduling problems. > Sure, if you are trying to do both at the same > time and your browser is loading in a plugin or something it is a problem > ... but then again, that's a problem on Mac OS X too. I'm running OS X on about as crappy a machine as you can have any pretensions of productively running it on. In a lot of ways the Bondi iMac I've got a line on will be an UPGRADE. And it's not a problem there. > For single-user machines -- and I was a power user on Mac OS, doing many > things at once -- cooperative multitasking simply wasn't a problem for most > users, including me. Sure it was. You just got used to it. I've pulled a muscle in my back, I've got a bad knee, I've got poor and worsening eyesight, and I've got adult ADHD. I've gotten used to these things. They don't get in the way of my daily activities because I've arranged my daily activities to accomodate them. That doesn't mean they're not problems! > >And takes a fricking age to wake up again when I open it again. > That's more of a function of your hardware, in my experience (I've had just > about every laptop Apple's made since the Wall Street, and the newer > hardware + software [including a Lombard/500 with Mac OS 9.2.x]) that woke > up quite speedily. Look, I'm running FreeBSD on a 166 MHz laptop and I have it set to hibernate to disk, not just go to standby, because it takes it less than 20 seconds to restore when I bring it up again. It can take another half a minute to reinitialise the wireless card if I have it in, but that happens in the background... I don't see it, I do get a brief GUI freeze if it needs to reinitialise the hardware, but that's about all. This machine is about the equivalent of a first-generation Power PC. It's not even an MMX. And it doesn't have the Power PC's short efficient pipeline. And that's not coming up from standby: it boots from power off, copies the memory image from disk, and reinitialises all the hardware from a cold start. I don't need to consciously use multitasking to benefit from it. It makes the whole system more responsive and reliable, to the point where I can point to dreadful ancient machines with a modern OS under the hood (my AT&T UNIX PC, running System V in *1.5 megabytes* on a 68010 at 12 MHz, my NeXTstation and my laptop... running BOTH immediate parents of OS X) that don't suffer from Classic Mac OS' delerium tremens. Mac OS, before Mac OS X, was so appalling that it's a testament to Microsoft's ability to trash themselves that they managed to make a more modern OS (and I'm talking about the old DOS-based Win32 here, not NT) into something even less attractive.There's stuff above here
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