From: Gary Wiltshire 

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.

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