Re: [MacPerl] What's Latest MacPerl

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 0:43 -0500 7/20/99, Matthew Langford wrote:
>I'm probably shouting ignorance here, but I suspect MacOS threads are
>mostly designed for OpenTransport-based servers and faceless background
>apps.  (FBAs seem to be that subset of programs which are ineffective
>enough to stay out of trouble.)

The Thread Manager predates both OpenTransport and faceless background
applications, going back to the very early 1990s or late 1980s.  [It only
does pre-emptive scheduling on 68000, which is rather a nuisance...it does
cooperative scheduling on both (and on the Mac Plus only, one can't write
resources except in the main thread...if one tries, *some* file on the disk
<usually not the one being written to> will have its resource fork
trashed).]

The first in-application multi-tasking  I know about on Mac goes back--in
released form--to about March 1984, when MacForth was released (it wasn't
*supported* until the next MacForth release, but it worked in the first
one).  That was inherited from traditional Forth, and didn't use any System
help.  It would have been multi-user as well, had that been possible
elsewhere on the machine, with the usual Forth problem of "I just wrote out
that disk block you were carefully avoiding writing."

  --John
-- 
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA

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