From: Colm Buckley (colm at domain tuatha.org)
Date: Tue 29 Feb 2000 - 14:59:59 GMT
[Gods, I'm defending Microsoft. Someone kill me, please...]
Aaron Mc Daid writes (quoting me) :
> I have to agree and I knew about most of that already but if :
>> "one big address space" as well as virtual memory
> was possible from 1987 why didn't windows 3.1 use it? Why wait another
> EIGHT years for a simple thing like proper multitasking (which still
> seems to be broken in Windows. I hope win2k finally does it right)
Oh, come now. If you flame Microsoft, at least flame them for things
which *are* actually broken. NT4 has "proper multitasking" which is at
least as good as most Unix flavours; there's no need to wait for W2k for
*that*.
The 'other' strain of Windows (3.1 -> 95 -> 98) was hampered by the need
to retain close to 100% backwards compatibility with DOS; and all the
assumptions that DOS programs, particularly games made about direct
access to hardware. The memory-management and multitasking system in
these "operating systems" will never be more than a spectacular kludge,
but there are *reasons* why its so bad - like most Microsoft
systems-level stuff, it's a good implementation of a
fundamentally-flawed design.
Colm
-- Colm Buckley B.A. B.F. # colm at domain tuatha.org # +353 87 2469146 http://www.tuatha.org/~colm/ # whois cb3765 When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
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