X-POP3-Rcpt: jaques.law@louise X-Sender: jcrussell@mail.enterprise.net Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 04:51:43 +0000 To: jaques.law@dlcwest.com From: "James C. Russell" Subject: newsletter sumbission Mime-Version: 1.0 Hi Kevin, I was writing a message to Neel about Windows 95, and it developed a bit, and I realized that it might be the sort of thing MUGORS members would like to read in Mugshot, to reinforce their confidence in their choice of computing platform. What do you think? --- cut here --- DOS really does bring windows down, try this on a win95 machine: select 10 files drag them all onto notepad or any other application. more than likely, you'll see an error box with this highly informative message: "a device attatched to the system is not functioning" Try the same perfectly simple operation on a Macintosh: select 10 files (or 900 files) drag them all onto simpletext or any other application. they open... The reason is DOS. Window 95 creates a (gasp!) Command Line, which it then passes to the application in question. This command line has a limited length, of somewhere around 250 characters, if I remember accurtely. The problem is that the complete, absolute path to each file is passed, and if the file is on the desktop, then you have 'c:\windows\desktop\' repeated once for each file, and once for the application. If the machine is set up to handle workgroups, as most business machines are, the path is even longer. This places an absolute limit on how many files can be simultaneously opened from the desktop. Most people's files are stored in folders, making for even longer paths. A quick test shows that no more than 2 (two) randomely selected files on my desktop can be opened at once. The two reasons MacOS doesn't choke are that the event queue (the closest thing to command line), is 32,000 chars, and that because the mac keeps a unique number associated with each file, it passes this instead of the path. This has other benefits, including being able to move files and aliases around without breaking things (except hypercard...), but that's a different article.