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Path: utzoo!utcsri!utai!lamy
From: lamy@utai.UUCP (Francois Lamy)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: slow concurrent processes
Message-ID: <727@utai.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 17:43:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: utai.727
Posted: Tue Sep 24 17:43:21 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Sep-85 18:45:07 EDT
Reply-To: lamy@utai.UUCP (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Distribution: net.micro.amiga
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 19
Summary: 

I guess the most important use of concurrent processes on the Amiga
will be the special case where all but one process are idle, i.e. when
you left what you were doing to do something else and need the context
to be preserved.  The Mac's Switcher provides a weak version of
this capability since you cannot, say, seek some information
and bring it to the screen were you need it, and that you are severely
limited in the number of applications you can run at once.
In such a setting you don't need blindingly fast context switches.

On another subject, too bad the Amiga didn't get the text done
as nicely as it could have been.  Perhaps one day we will see cheap
machines that keep the fonts only in outline format and use special
purpose hardware to produce the bit-mapped representation.  The only
machine I know which does this resolution independant trick is a
Norwegian workstation called "Mach-S".

Jean-Francois Lamy.
UUCP: {allegra,cornell,decvax,utzoo}!utcsri!utai!lamy
CSNET: lamy%utai@toronto