I've snipped quite a few of your paragraphs because later on you say "I didn't understand what you could possibly mean by that", and also Phil Daley (in his post addressing those remarks) seems to have a handle on the situation because he gets to the point in just a few lines.
[...]
However:
So I'll stand corrected on when exactly DOS died but have to ask why not? DOS was the Microsoft system at the time.
At *what* time? You haven't specified.
According to Phil Daley, 1982 but I could live with 1984.
Secondly, I've previously explained to Jari that the keyword in my phrase was "concept". The whole Macintosh concept was first realized in 1984. I'm not sure of the date, but certainly before the end of 1986, Apple released AUX (Apple Unix); which is multitasking by definition and also supported a concurrently running MacOS that had all GUI features of that period. So the statement:
Microsoft got it right long before Apple, by introducing decent multi-tasking by Windows 3.0
is very misleading because obviously Apple had a multitasking system at their disposal years before Microsoft but for one reason or another decided it was not advantageous to use it at the time. Perhaps the Amiga fiasco scared them off a bit. I saw Windows 3.0 many years ago. It was pathetic.
OK, I was trying to make sense of what you said, which to me was nonsensical. You said Windows programmers had to deal with multi-tasking and Mac programmers didn't.
Nope. I said "Multitasking as an issue".
I took that to me that your remarks about the Mac messaging loop were not counted by you as multitasking. I didn't understand what you could possibly mean by that, but took you at what I understood to be your word.
Finally, I have to question whether either you or Jari truly understand that the (old) MacOS had it's way of arriving at solutions that MS has to use multitasking for.
There you go -- I cannot make any logical sense out of what you've just said. First you say Mac has multitasking. Then you say it > doesn't.
Nope, I didn't say that. I'm trying to convey that fact that multitasking solved a lot of problems for Windows developers but really wouldn't have done a lot for the MacOS of that era. That's why it was/is only an issue for Windows folks (and their ad campaigns).
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. . . If I could use your previous example from the repertoire (and BTW don't you mean K. 333?):
Yes. I always second-guess myself on the K. numbers for that group of sonatas.
Don't worry, I didn't actually catch the typo on first reading. Only when I tried to bulk search my mail for "333" did I become completely baffled. Then I realized I had actually recognized it from your description and not the K. number.
[...]
To attempt an analogy, I think that you and Jari have been deceived by only being exposed to and only analyzing the B&H version of the Mac score. And furthermore, don't understand that AppleEvents give the Mac--and hence its event loop--an extra dimension that makes it transcendent to Microsoft's notion. And prior to MacOS X, transcendent to any unix as well.
Then why did Apple have to trash their whole OS and use a different one to implement real multitasking and virtual memory?
Steve Jobs.
That is, if it was so great, why did it prevent Apple from creating a modern, stable, scalable OS out of it?
They did have one in the works and the OpenDoc concept would have had a major role.
Adaption of the old MacOS to a pre-emptive multitasking system is embodied in the Carbon layer. Carbon supports ~90% of the the old toolbox APIs (including the event loop in question). So you see, the Macintosh _concept_ gains only about 10% in OS X. Where OS X really shines is in the area of blending MacOS, Cocoa (NeXT), and unix. For instance a substantial portion of Cocoa is now interfaced/integrated with AppleEvents and it's possible to make unix calls with our AppleEvent-based scripting language (AppleScript) and vice versa. Multitasking simply isn't an issue on the Mac. Get the point? Multitasking is only an issue for Windows developers.
Philip Aker http://www.aker.ca
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