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Will Pervasive Multithreading Make a Comeback?
exigentsky writes "Having looked at BeOS technology, it is clear that, like NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time. Most remarkable to me is the incredible responsiveness of the whole OS. On relatively slow hardware, BeOS could run eight movies simultaneously while still being responsive in all of its GUI controls, and launching programs almost instantaneously. Today, more than ten years after BeOS's introduction, its legendary responsiveness is still unmatched. There is simply no other major OS that has pervasive multithreading from the lowest level up (requiring no programmer tricks). Is it likely, or at least possible, that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"
OSes like BeOS and Zeta are ahead of their time. With 8 core cpus coming out soon it just makes since with this technology... no programming tricks are needed.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
X is being fixed, thankfully (finally). There are a lot of interesting projects, including but not limited to Xegl. Xegl, is the long term goal of the X server and pretty much reduces the X server to a tiny part of the system, basically mediating the input devices, rotation and display management and TCP/over-the-wire GL, if I understand correctly, by using the Embedded GL specifications.
Hey, I'm all for Amiga's but in the mid Eighties, if you had 128MB of ram and was downloading a file online, you must have been from the future.
What the heck are you talking about?
Just to be a little more correct here, I'm no hardware engineer but will try to be far more accurate.
The Amiga had a great messaging system in it's OS, you could easily pass messages to other windows and programs in intuition. Further, you had all that ARexx stuff, and you could script programs to interact very easily with it. Basically, every program could listen on it's own ARexx socket for commands from other programs. Of course, there was the poor (read, no) memory protection which made things very unstable if you did not know what you were doing. Despite all this cool stuff, the OS was actually the weakest link. It was rushed. I remember reading specs on the original intended, but non-implemented file system, and it was about as robust as a single user file system could possibly get.
You also had preemptive multitasking (not true co-operative) and a fantastic unified memory architecture with a very fast blitter. Another nice thing was
that the kernel was contained on ROM so that it booted quicker then any other platform of it's day, and still faster then most this day. And all those chips played nice
and were synced to an internal clock that ran on NTSC (or PAL) timings. This, of course, meant that interrupts worked seamlessly, and the chipset was handily compatible with video signals from television equipment. That last thing turned into an incredible boon for the entire film and television industry.
The strength of the Amiga was it's bus and it's architecture. They absolutely nailed so many things in it's design, it really was a thing of beauty.