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To: antiRepublicrat
To me, the clear evidence is that they started off with an inferior implementation of the idea of their predecessor (Apple) that took over a decade and four full versions to approach what they were trying to copy.

Like I said, MacHeads have the best weed.

Mac's memory management was a joke and Mac's did not do multitasking until the late 1990's - that is why the Mac has never been considered a business machine. Mac lost because they had an inferior product. Spin all you want, the computer industry does not buy the MacMythology. Numbers talk and BS walks.

297 posted on 03/09/2005 5:49:02 PM PST by Last Visible Dog
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To: Last Visible Dog
Mac's memory management was a joke and Mac's did not do multitasking until the late 1990's - that is why the Mac has never been considered a business machine.

We're talking about the evolution of the GUI and who took from whom, not what's under the hood.

But if being crap under the hood mattered, then Windows would have fallen to OS/2.

304 posted on 03/09/2005 6:11:05 PM PST by antiRepublicrat
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To: Last Visible Dog
Mac's memory management was a joke and Mac's did not do multitasking until the late 1990's

I just reread this. Uh, yes it did. It also did multiprocessing. What it didn't do was preemptive multitasking with protected memory and symmetrical multiprocessing.

305 posted on 03/09/2005 6:15:21 PM PST by antiRepublicrat
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To: Last Visible Dog
Mac's memory management was a joke and Mac's did not do multitasking until the late 1990's - that is why the Mac has never been considered a business machine. Mac lost because they had an inferior product. Spin all you want, the computer industry does not buy the MacMythology. Numbers talk and BS walks.

Who told you that piece of misinformation? I did one hell of a lot of multitasking on Macintoshes WAY before that... running Pagemaker, Photoshop, WordPerfect, Filemaker and several utilities all at the same time. And that was in the late 1980s.

Multifinder - The multitasking version of Finder for Apple Macintosh computers. This is the part of the operating system responsible for managing the desktop -- locating documents and folders and handling the Clipboard and Scrapbook. For System 6, and earlier versions of the Mac OS, MultiFinder was optional. Since System 7, MultiFinder has replaced the older Finder.

See... more ignorance. Let's just see when Multifinder became the default operating system for Macintosh when System 7 was released:

The official release date for System 7.0 was April 1991

Hmmmmm.... nope, April, 1991, does not equate to the late 1990s.

How about when Apple released Multifinder itself??? Note the date in the following article:

Author: from AppleLink
Date: September , 1987
Keywords: multifinder release tips hints announce announcement
Text:
You can boost the productivity, speed, and ease-of-use of your Macintosh systems with MultiFinder--the first generation multitasking operating system for the Macintosh. With MultiFinder, you can:
-- Use multiple applications at the same time
-- Switch between them at the touch of a button
-- Print documents while working on other applications

And new applications will allow you to do things like background telecom-munications or file processing so you can do one thing, while the computer does another. It's like having multiple computers at your fingertips.

MultiFinder saves time normally spent switching between applications by allowing more than one application to be open at once. There's no need to close and re-launch programs when switching between applications. With MultiFinder, cutting and pasting from one application to another is fast and easy, since both can be open at once.

Hmmmm... September, 1987... nope, that doesn't equal late 1990s either.

Now I will admit that Apple did not have true "pre-emptive multitasking" until the late 1990s... Both Apple and Windows really used "cooperative multitasking", depending on the application to nicely release its hold on system resources. Windows 95 supported pre-emptive multitasking but still required applications to be written to take advantage of it... if even one did not, the "blue screen of death" could visit the user because of one misbehaving application. With the release of OSX and Windows XP, pre-emptive multitasking is finally mature on those platforms. The Amiga computer had pre-emptive multitasking from day one in 1985 ... but even it had occasionaly "guru meditations" that were the Amiga equivalent of the Windows BSOD and Apple's Bomb.

Also, I will admit that the old Apple way of assigning memory to applications was kludgy... but it worked.

342 posted on 03/09/2005 11:29:31 PM PST by Swordmaker
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