Questions tagged [multitasking]
Questions regarding running more than one task concurrently on a retrocomputer.
13 questions
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How was MP/M’s time sharing implemented?
MP/M, the multi-user sibling of Digital Research ubiquitous CP/M, implemented time-sharing in a way that appears to be very efficient. Processes don’t appear to see each other’s memory and performance ...
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Amiga multitasking - different resolution for each program on screen dragging
I'm wondering about screen resolution while having two or more multitasking programs - concurrently on screen using dragging such as:
Dpaint is on a 320x256 screen, 32 colours
Workbench is on a ...
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Early implementations of the `system()` call in a consumer OS
Nowadays, it's easy to take for granted the system() call (as defined in POSIX), which allows a user program to easily execute a child process and wait for it to complete. Obviously, this is a trivial ...
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How did the Motorola MC68030 and MC68040 come to have the powerful and expensive CAS2 instruction?
The CAS2 instruction - double compare-and-swap - is an extremely powerful instruction that was coveted for quite awhile (and still is, really) for making lock-free and wait-free data structures - that ...
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What was the earliest system to explicitly support threading based on shared memory?
The notion of multiple processes has been around a long time, at least since the IBM 360. Multiple processes running at the same time, in separate memory spaces with protection from each other.
(In ...
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Is the ZX Spectrum multithread capable? [closed]
I know the spectrum had the IM2 mode, but can I start multiple threads running simultaneously?
Like to play sounds, watch the keyboard, and other tasks who can be runned simultaneous.
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Was it possible to listen to music and work on old PCs? When was it possible to for the first time?
I was wondering the other day, would it be possible to listen to a midi on a C64 while writing a program or something. I mean it did have a sound chip that would technically just get some new buffers ...
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What was the first operating system that supported preemptive multitasking?
What was the first operating system that supported preemptive multitasking?
By preemptive multitasking I mean that user processes were able to run in a time-sliced manner without special programming, ...
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Examples of operating systems using hardware task switching of x86 CPUs
Intel IA-32 architecture a.k.a. x86 offers hardware task switching capabilities since 80386. It includes TR (task register), memory segmentation features such as Task State Segment, task gates, call ...
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What are my options for multitasking in MS-DOS 5.0 on an 80186 with EMS?
I've got an HP 200LX, which runs DOS 5.0 from ROM, and I'm using EMM200 to provide some EMS from the C: RAM disk (it uses the memory controller to directly map the "disk" blocks into memory, ...
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Did any 8-bit computer system / OS have concepts for concurrency and multitasking like we know from today?
So, today all major OS support multitasking and concurrency in languages like for instance threading.
The Amiga seems to be the first home computer which has advanced concepts in this area. But had ...
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How did DoubleDOS work?
Back in the MS-DOS days, there was a program DoubleDOS that you could run that would split your machine in half and multitask two separate DOS programs. While it didn't particularly work well for ...
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How did Windows 3.1 implement multitasking?
Windows in its earliest days was simply a shell that ran on top of MS-DOS, which means that Windows 3.1 itself was actually just a standard MS-DOS application like any other.
Yet, MS-DOS is not a ...
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