From: Mike '/m' 

On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 13:31:12 -0400, Gary Wiltshire  wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 19:25:34 +0300, "Antti Kurenniemi"
> wrote:
>
>>"Ellen K."  wrote in message
>>news:qb9efvorkbcvjorusevo01qhplik6kvs0r{at}4ax.com...
>>> Here are two things I've experienced on W2K at work:
>>>
>>> 1.  If you open a DOS program, the CPU zooms up to 100%
>>> (ergo slowing everything else down) until you close it.    I think
>>> this one is pretty well known.   You can see it for yourself by
>>> opening edit from the command line.
>>
>>It's a "busy loop" (I don't know if the term translates
properly?). When DOS
>>was largely used, it was quite alright to write a loop in an application
>>that simply looped over and over full blast until some exit condition was
>>reached - for example reading keyboard input was often done like that. It
>>was ok because you did have to think about giving other apps any cpu time.
>>
>>It isn't necessary for a DOS app to behave like that, but avoiding it would
>>usually take some extra coding which wasn't really much use so I don't think
>>many programmers ever bothered. I know I didn't .
>>
>>
>>Antti Kurenniemi
>>
>
>I did.  As a fellow Pascal man:
>
>  procedure ReleaseTimeSlice; assembler;
>  asm
>    mov ax,$1680
>    int $2F
>  end;
>
>It is/was quite effective.


Oops... it was Int 0x2F, not 0x21, as I had remembered.   It's been too
long since I've been down at that level of programming....
 /m

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