We take it for granted, nowadays, that our computers will allow us to do more than one thing at a time, or multitask as it is called. It is easy to type a letter into ClarisWorks while simultaneously print a complicated file in the background and send and receive email.
On the Mac, multitasking is not as up to date as some users would prefer. Applications have to act cooperatively and share the CPU. Windows and UNIX have a different form of multitasking that gives each program a fair share of the CPU. While this does have its drawbacks, it is the way Apple is heading in future versions of its operating systems. The question must be asked, is it all really necessary anyway?
For those of us whose Mac usage extends back to System 6, multitasking was not available until Apple included MultiFinder in the Systems of the late 1980's. This was a choice available at start-up time that gave the option of having more than one application open at the expense of RAM used by the System. For the contemporary computers, 8 megabytes was considered more than enough for almost anything. Without MultiFinder only one major piece of software could run at a time, developers turned to the idea of using Control Panels instead. It was possible to have complete word processing and office utility packages that ran as Control Panels. These were available at the same time as the sole major application open on the Mac.
System 7 was a tremendous step forward by incorporating MultiFinder and introducing the idea of a desktop you could actually drop files onto. It came with a problem – if one application crashed it left the user isolated from other applications open at the same time. Again, this issue is addressed by other operating systems and will be so in a future MacOS, by protecting the area of RAM each program uses. In reality it doesn't always work quite as efficiently as it should. Bill Gates demonstrated this to the world when he was introducing Windows 98. His PC crashed with the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ and brought down the whole system. Of late, especially since System 7.6, crashing one piece of software does not necessarily prevent you from accessing other open applications to save work and restart.
This is all very good, but again, is it all necessary? Take the situation where a user has three Macs for their sole use. One can be Ripping a file for printing to a large format printer, another can be burning a CD while the third could be running a heavyweight Photoshop filter across a large file. All these tasks require large chunks of computer time and best left uninterrupted. Multitasking on these Macs, although possible in both Photoshop and with most PostScript RIPs, would not have helped here. Anyway, would you really want to trust important work (i.e. money-earning) to a single CPU? Computers crash at some time or other - maybe not in the future according to HP but for the future they will do so. Protected memory helps but current desktop computers are best at dealing with one important task at a time. It will be some years before we will really appreciate the benefits of multitasking. This will be when CPU's become so fast they can achieve in fractions of a second that which today takes minutes, or even hours.
There is an alternative – instead of expecting one Mac to do everything, have two or more Macs doing a little toward the whole.
The main problem with having more than one computer is that they take up too much space. A previous MacMuser article discussed whether the current drift towards tower-shaped cases was really of any major benefit to the average user, because they occupy large areas of desk space and do not allow vertical stacking of Macs or the positioning of a monitor on top. There is, thankfully, a solution to having multi-Macs rather than multitasking.
 
The answer is of course PowerBooks. Today's lower end Powerbooks are yesterdays cutting edge, there has never been a better time to buy a Powerbook. 140's and 160 sit at less than two hundred pounds and I've seen 5300c's for just over five hundred!. The G3 versions start a little more expensive than a desktop computer but they will soon drop in price. Meanwhile the older PowerBook 1400 series are going for a song with the 3400 for a little more. They are powerful by any standard, equipped with a CPU running faster than the original Power PC desktop Macs of three or so years ago, with the added advantage that the CPU is upgradable. They come equipped with ample RAM, have networking built in, are connectable to monitors, SCSI circuits and all the paraphernalia of modern computing and they take up minuscule amounts of desk space.
The future of computers is likey to be in portables, at present for Apple this is their fastest growing sales market. As more people work at home or away from a set office location, yet needing to take their working environment with them, the portable computer allows them to do so. For power users such as MacMuser, three Macs with three monitors and keyboards need three desks to spread across and consume electricity at an alarming rate. By no stretch of the imagination are those three Macs within easy reach. However, make that one main desktop Mac running one monitor, plus two Powerbooks to do the ancilliary tasks and they will all fit comfortably on one desk within easy reach of their operator. The added advantage is that Trackpads, as
currently built into PowerBooks, are very easy to use with the left or right hand.
Can anyone offer a retirement home for a well loved but redundant 7100 system?
