Moved to chat. Twenty years or so ago IBM came up with separate what they called "address spaces" providing protection between users or applications. I think CDC did this earlier but I didn't work with CDC at that time. This is the step that I think is so good about Chrome. VM type systems provide that too.
Another important step in computers came forty or so years ago IBM defined wait and post in their PCP operating system. At least that's where I first saw it. It wasn't necessary to define that as PCP was not multitasking but all systems I had seen before that did spin loops looking under rocks to see if there was something to do. The DOS system on PCs did the spin loops too, which made it difficult for Microsoft to add multiprogramming to Windows. Now there are semaphore addons all over the place as such a thing as wait and post were not clearly defined as basic to the operating system. Another interesting feature came with the CDC Star series of processors which did bit addressing. That is, each bit in memory had its own address simplifying programs which have to address individual bits. They had 64 bit addressing years ago. Swapping is horrible in Windows! Windows and now Vista both seem to wait until it's too late to realize that they are having a shortage of real memory causing loooong delays while it is writing out pages to free up real memory. Mainframes addressed that years ago. But the real problem that Chrome still does not address is that no one is really addressing the problem of software installations. It looks like Google touches on it but doesn't solve it. When a new software package is installed a cryptic message pops up in a box which the documentation tells you to ignore and reply "allow". Until an operating system is defined which does not allow any modifications to it even for device drivers, which at the level it can do anything added software will always be able to add its hooks and do who knows what. On 9/3/08, Jim Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I have yet to find any mainframe invention worth spit. To which do you > refer? > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Sep 2, 2008, at 11:22 AM, "Don Guinn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Fantastic! >> >> It's about time somebody working with PCs started inventing the things >> that >> were invented 20 years ago on mainframes. >> >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
