YOUR MAC TO PC column is usually one of my favorites in the magazine, but the November '95 installment ("Mac Meets Windows 95," page 123) had a good deal of technically inaccurate information.
Preemptive multitasking has nothing to do with allowing "multiple applications to reside in [their] own memory space." Instead, it allows one application or background task to get control of the computer even when other applications don't explicitly yield control. Applications' having their own memory space is a feature known as memory protection.
Memory protection and preemptive multitasking are both needed features -- other operating systems such as UNIX have had them both for years -- and it would do good for users in the Mac community to understand what both are, why we need them, and how difficult it may be for Apple to deliver them both along with backward compatibility.
Rob Newberry
via the Internet
I'M A MAC USER who is very impressed with Windows 95's multitasking. However, as I write this, I'm downloading a movie over my Ethernet connection to the Internet and downloading a program from eWorld -- and a desktop poster program is changing my desktop picture every 30 minutes. I'm not jealous of Windows 95.
