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JdeBPlast Monday at 6:29 AM1 replyview on HN

You actually mis-remember. One of the things that was a perpetual telephone-game distortion during the Operating System Wars was people talking about a single input queue.

Presentation Manager did not have a single input queue. Every PM application had its own input queue, right from when PM began in OS/2 1.1, created by a function named WinCreateMsgQueue() no less. There were very clearly more than 1 queue. What PM had was synchronous input, as opposed to asynchronous in Win32 on Windows NT.

Interestingly, in later 32-bit OS/2 IBM added some desynchronization where input would be continued asynchronously if an application stalled.

Here's Daniel McNulty explaining the difference in 1996:

* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.os2.beta/c/eTlmIYgm2WI/m...

And here's me kicking off an entire thread about it the same year:

* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.os2.programmer.misc/c/Lh...


Replies

dnh44last Monday at 12:09 PM

Thanks for the reminder! It’s very likely I read that post as a teenager.