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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:27:05 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> (Demonstrated by, e.g., writing a short program that prints out numbers,
> and then switching to another window and seeing the first program stop
> printing until you switch back.)
This was not the behaviour in Win3x. Win3x used nonpreemptive
multitasking, but it still was more than task switching (which is what
you describe).
Desqview also provided multitasking capabilities on top of DOS.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:16:03 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Most systems that I have seen either charge you X per minute you're
> online, X per unit of data downloaded/uploaded, or X per month. AOL are
> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per
> minute as well.
>
> No number they're No.1? :-/
I use Earthlink here in the US. They're arguably one of the largest ISPs
here. Flat rate ($50/month), no bandwidth caps, always-on connection.
Flat rate is more common here in the US, though Comcast has been toying
with tiered access based on bandwidth utilization and throttling (that's
been in El Reg a few times over the last several months).
There's a reason I don't use Comcast.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:36:35 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Even back then, may ISPs offered per-minute charges OR flat-rate
> charges. AOL are charging you both ways at the same time.
CompuServe also charged a flat rate ($19.95/month IIRC) plus a surcharge
for per-minute access to some services. Then there were add-on services
that you could purchase as well.
It was almost as convoluted as picking a cell phone plan these days.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:14:28 -0400, Warp wrote:
> OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
In Europe, yes. In the US, no. I got an upgrade recently (for free) to
3 Mbps from 1.5. It's amazing that that still qualifies as "broadband"
here in the US.
Jim
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Invisible wrote:
> [Why would you want several windows in
> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
Win3.1 would run several programs at once. Just not preemptively. But
unless something went wrong, you didn't really notice it.
Note that at the same time, the Mac could have several windows open, but
only one program at a time, so all the windows had to come from the same
program. What??
I went and bought an Amiga, myself. ;-)
> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
> looking for one that actually functioned?
Yeah. It was sooo nice when you actually got printer drivers with the
OS, instead of six floppies of printer drivers coming with each
application.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Invisible wrote:
> this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after Unix
AmigaOS was farther from being UNIX-like than DOS 2.0 was. The two had
absolutely nothing in common.
Let me rephrase: What did you think was common about the two of those?
About the only thing I can think of is they both had pre-emptive
interrupts.
> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
> anywhere........]
I saw a distro that used symlinks to completely "fix" the legacy layout
of files. So their Linux had a /Programs and a /Library and a /Users and
so on, not unlike OSX apparently has.
> Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS
> powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never
> tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.
I didn't have any trouble with that, except for the amount of RAM it
took. Left little for the actual applications.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Warp wrote:
> Don't you mean "over"? If you say "under" you are effectively saying
I think he mean "under" in the sense of "Firefox runs under both windows
and Linux."
> (Well, the 286 had
> some paging support built into it, but I don't know if any computer ever
> used it.)
I think it had virtual memory but not dynamic paging. (To have dynamic
paging, you have to be able to restart an instruction that accesses
invalid memory, so you can restart it after you page the data into RAM
from disk.) Some applications used it, tho - photoshop did, I think.
> when someone mentions the modern equivalent of the
> Amiga/AmigaOS, namely the Apple Macintosh,
Isn't OSX based on POSIX at least? The stuff *I* liked about the Amiga
is all missing from POSIX, as far as I can see. :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Warp wrote:
> Most unix machines did that in the 70's.
Most unix machines didn't have any sort of graphics at all in the '70s,
technically. I never saw a unix machine that didn't need hardware paging
support for VM. I think the old PDPs didn't, but they were, when you got
right down to it, really almost single-user machines - every time you
ran a compute quantum, it had to be swapped in.
Certainly a sparcstation with 4MB of RAM was unusable for X11.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> In Europe, yes. In the US, no. I got an upgrade recently (for free) to
> 3 Mbps from 1.5. It's amazing that that still qualifies as "broadband"
> here in the US.
I think "broadband" is a marketing term which means "anything faster
than ISDN".
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
>
> I think "broadband" is a marketing term which means "anything faster
> than ISDN".
>
When wires are disconnected and the user heads for mobile environment,
"broadband" means pretty far "anything that connects"...
--
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
http://www.zbxt.net
aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid
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