On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:29:34 +0000 (UTC), Larry Blanchard
wrote:

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:53:10 -0400, m II wrote:

or some idiot didn't know that a multitasking system had to be called
from your own code every few milliseconds or your printer would stop.

That's cooperative multitasking. You mean they didn't use preemptive
multitasking? That's a serious question - I know very little about
Windows internals. I used to know a fair amount about the innards of
Unix, but since retirement I've even gotten obsolete on that.

Yes, early Win's multitasking was cooperative. OS/2's was preemptive and
therefore much more responsive when doing certain tasks.