Peter wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> 
>> Peter Johansson wrote:
>>
>>> The reason most people don't know of this is that Macs actually worked
>>> very well as desktop machines with cooperative multitasking, unlike
>>> Windows boxen of the time which BSODed or needed to be rebooted
>>> several times each day.
>>
>> How come then that some Mac web developer acquaintances of mine never heard
>> of having a development web server running on their machines in pre-OS X
>> times? Something that was quite common among Windows web developers
>> (working on NT type systems). Did they just not know?
> 
> Afaik on Macs before OS X there was a strong division between system and 
> user tasks. There was only one user task running at any one time, 

This was what Mac guys told me. Don't know whether that's correct, but it
is quite different from what Peter Johansson wrote.

> but several systems tasks could run concurrently. To have a server
> running one had to make it a system task (I'm probably using the wrong
> terminology for the Mac). Example: file sharing worked in parallel with
> whatever the user was doing with not visible side effects.

This doesn't sound too much like "cooperative multitasking". It sounds more
like DOS-style TSR programs... :)

Gerhard
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