From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

"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

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