[rescue] Mac Appliance

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Sun, Aug 05, 2001 at 01:07:10AM -0400, s at avoidant.org wrote:
> Scott Newell wrote:
> 
> > What about OS/2?  I remember someone once explaining to me that while the
> > OS was preemptively multitasking, the Presentation Manager was serialized
> > and single threaded.  I've never worked with OS/2, so I have no idea if
> > that's true or not.
> 
> My last professional experience with OS/2 was a few years ago, but from
> what I know it's fully preemptive. I'm not sure how a human could tell
> if the PM was preemptive or serial, since we're mostly serial, but if

The deal was, that the input queue (mouse and keyboard events) was not
preemptive.  So if something was hogging the queue, everything else would
keep working but you would have to wait for control of the kb and mouse to
come back.  This was most noticeable as a few seconds delay after you
clicked on an icon to start a program.

The ONLY feature that NT had over OS/2 was an asynchronous input queue,
where control would return immediately.  The NT zealots always made it sound
like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, of course.

Note that when you start a CDE app under Solaris, or Netscape under
virtually any X desktop, you sometimes see similar behavior.

./patrick