Interesting.   Thanks for the explanation.   :)

> 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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