Re: Multiprocessing? (Was: [MacPerl] acgi vs cgi (fwd))

[Mark Johns <mark.johns@dawsonhost.dawson.com>]

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At 10:20 AM 11/11/97 -0700, Howard Soroka wrote:
>
>>Ummmmmmmm.....no.  Multiprocessing does not equal multiple
>>processors.  Multiprocessing means Multiple Processes.  The
>>Mac kind-of does multiprocessing.  You can check this out
>>by first bringing up BBEdit, MacPerl, QPQ, and Netscape.
>>Check under the "?" area.  You will see all of these things
>>are running on the system.  They are (if you want to
>>stretch the actual means of the word) multiprocessing.  In
>>my humble opinion though - what they are actually doing is
>>a form of timesharing.  But others will probably disagree.
>>
>
>Sure enough, I diasagree. Back when I was in Famous Programmer's 
School in the early cretaceous period ('81, '82-ish) we believed 
these terms went with these (highly informal) definitions:
>
>Multiprocessing: Use of more than one CPU (not possible with ONE 
CPU), presumably for some noble computational purpose (as opposed to 
say, paperweights).
>
>Multitasking: More than one process running on a given single CPU. 
This is also known as Time-Sharing no matter how you slice it. You 
can't multitask on a single CPU without sharing time, unless you're 
in some other universe where guys like Newton and Einstein are 
considered idiots.
>
>Parallel processing: something cool you could do if you had more 
than one processor and the ability to split up pieces of a program so 
that those multiple processors each ran a chunk of the program 
(thread) simultaneously, in the interest of getting better overall 
performance of the WHOLE program. Analogous to having nine women be 
pregnant for one month and getting a baby as a result, instead of one 
woman pregnant for nine months and getting the same result. Except 
that it's do-able.
>
>Since I'm mostly lurking here, and reserve the right to be stupid, I 
invite others to tell me that my CS education is obsolete and 
everything I've said is wrong. It's important to me that I know 
whether or not my memory is working.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Howard
>

You _may_ BE stupid ;-), but your definitions agree with the ones I 
remember.

Cheers,
- -Mark

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=========================================================
Mark Johns, Quality Books, Inc. - " A Dawson Company "
mailto://mark.johns@dawson.com
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