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A comment on A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018). Parent comment

Re:A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple bu... by btilly on Thursday March 19, 2020 @07:53PM (#22633046)
The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience.

As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again.

Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.

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Re:A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple bu... by icedchai on Thursday March 19, 2020 @10:56PM (#22634213)
Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.
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Re:A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple bu... by pjmlp on Friday March 20, 2020 @04:44AM (#22636050)
Guru Meditation :)
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