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Retrocomputing

Questions tagged [multitasking]

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Questions regarding running more than one task concurrently on a retrocomputer.

15 questions
Newest Active Bountied Unanswered
2 votes
1 answer
443 views

I'm trying to write an OS for the W65C02 CPU but i'm stuck because I have no idea on how to implement concurrency on such old CPU.
Elia C.'s user avatar
  • 29
12 votes
2 answers
495 views

MP/M systems were capable of having multiple simultaneous users on terminals sharing files. Are there any known examples of games that leveraged this to create multi-player games where players would ...
rbanffy's user avatar
  • 869
10 votes
3 answers
1k views

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 ...
rbanffy's user avatar
  • 869
27 votes
4 answers
3k views

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 ...
Krackout's user avatar
  • 1,668
11 votes
5 answers
3k views

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 ...
Brian H's user avatar
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25 votes
2 answers
3k views

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 ...
davidbak's user avatar
  • 6,874
19 votes
11 answers
5k views

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 ...
rwallace's user avatar
  • 65.3k
3 votes
4 answers
943 views

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.
Marcelo Nunes's user avatar
  • 49
33 votes
19 answers
10k views

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 ...
user2741831's user avatar
  • 743
19 votes
1 answer
3k views

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, ...
Mark Harrison's user avatar
  • 895
20 votes
2 answers
3k views

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 ...
Grigory Rechistov's user avatar
  • 303
19 votes
6 answers
4k views

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, ...
db2's user avatar
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88 votes
19 answers
21k views

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 ...
Marco's user avatar
  • 1,457
23 votes
5 answers
4k views

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 ...
bjb's user avatar
  • 19.2k
93 votes
3 answers
18k views

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 ...
Mike Nielsen's user avatar
  • 2,937