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Given that he referenced a 486 he might be referring to earlier versions of both. Prior to Windows XP (possibly NT/2000) applications using GDI wrote directly
by cptskippy 8y ago
Given that he referenced a 486 he might be referring to earlier versions of both.
Prior to Windows XP (possibly NT/2000) applications using GDI wrote directly to video memory and if one crashed it could create a black hole on your screen. I believe Windows Vista was when Microsoft introduced true off screen rendering and added GPU based composition of the desktop. GDI/GDI+ are now considered legacy and the issues the OP described aren't much of a problem anymore.
I believe Quartz is the OSX/MacOS equivalent to GDI on Windows however it's been less problematic than GDI and I believe OSX was launched with off screen rendering and composition that made the issued described by the OP impossible. I have no idea of OS9 or prior versions performed desktop composition.
- acdha 8y agoThe OP comment wasn’t specific on timing - it sounded like a description of the recent era but if so wouldn’t be accurate unless you go back to the turn of the century. OS 9 was similar to old-school Windows with direct memory access. Users of either definitely were impressed by the stability of newer systems – Windows NT was a big jump, which OS X matched with minor improvements, and something like BeOS was truly impressive for being able to seamlessly recover from most driver crashes by restarting the entire display subsystem, which IIRC Windows took another decade and a half to match with Windows 7.