Multi-terminal
Multi-terminal
None of that.
Only asking if it would be easy enough to implement a task switch where the current 'task' / program is pushed into the background (and stops executing) and a new workspace exists to start another task of say, the next 128K bank. Copy/paste between the two would be nice. That's all.
Multi-terminal
2 hours ago, EMwhite said:
None of that.
Only asking if it would be easy enough to implement a task switch where the current 'task' / program is pushed into the background (and stops executing) and a new workspace exists to start another task of say, the next 128K bank. Copy/paste between the two would be nice. That's all.
Multitasking has been discussed, and it's not going to be part of the hardware.
You could implement your own multitasking operating system, using the banked memory, but that's something you'd have to do on your own or as a group with other users. It doesn't sound like the X16 team is interested in implementing any sort of multitasking (and I agree - that's far outside the scope of what this machine is.)
Multi-terminal
A simple task switcher wouldn’t be hard to implement for a particular set of programs that you know exactly what parts of RAM they do and don’t use. You could drop the code to do the swap somewhere in memory and hook it with an IRQ that watches for a particular keystroke or something.
Multi-terminal
10 hours ago, EMwhite said:
None of that.
Only asking if it would be easy enough to implement a task switch where the current 'task' / program is pushed into the background (and stops executing) and a new workspace exists to start another task of say, the next 128K bank. Copy/paste between the two would be nice. That's all.
In your prelude to your question, when you say "so multi-session (verses multi-tasking versus multi-user) is what is needed; similar to when Apple first supported Multifinder on OS7.1.", that's a claim that someone who has a use case for multi-tasking would dispute. Sorry if I did not catch your drift, but I can only read the words, and sometimes they may leave intention a bit invisible.
A switcher would be easy if you have a system for allocating space in Golden RAM and for allocating High RAM blocks ... grab a High RAM block for the switcher, and as many bytes as you need in Golden RAM for the launchpad to call the switcher, copy the Low RAM and the system High RAM blocks into a file to switch one application out, load the equivalent from the other application to load it in, away you go. That'd be much too slow for multi-tasking, but multi-tasking would need to be either in user space or else in a middle layer added by some programming language.
To bring that back to the topic raised at the start of this thread, if you had a task switcher, you could add a routine that when the system is idle, it checks both the local terminal and a serial terminal for activity, and if one of them starts inputting, it switches to a specified task.