- This topic has 16 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated Aug 24-2:37 pm by Brian Masinick.
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seaken64
Yes, word processors have become more common and have taken over. But in the old days we used Desktop Publishing and Text Editors and Vector Graphics or Bitmap Scanners and Editors and then layed out the document using a DTP engine and created a PostScript, or some proprietary instructions, to render the pages and prep for output.
Software would swap out pages to disk files, or ramdisk, and bring them back in and out as needed instead of keeping everything in a single document file. I’m not sure how it’s done anymore. This was back in the days of DOS or CP/M or some Unix, and then the MAC took over. I haven’t been in that space since. But I do know we needed a lot less resources to accomplish our tasks.
Seaken64
Brian Masinick
“But I do know we needed a lot less resources to accomplish our tasks.” … and it took a GREAT DEAL longer to accomplish most of those (computer-based) tasks. Some tasks, as we know, are still best handled by “using our brains!
Context switching is what takes place when a computer shifts to another task, whether it’s memory management or giving a time slice to a different process. At the time that the earliest microcomputers and personal computers arrived, some of the more capable machines could complete more than one instruction before swapping out and scheduling another resource. In fact, if enough memory was available, a program could remain in memory even if another process was using the system. These days, that’s actually what happens except on time sharing systems with MANY users simultaneously using resources. In most circles, that is not commonplace anymore; most of us have our own systems, and only SERVER workloads share resources.
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Brian Masinick
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