MTASK 1.1 by Wayne Conrad


MTASK is a unit for Turbo Pascal 5.0, to allow a Turbo Pascal program to
exhibit simple multi-tasking.  MTASK gives your program a
non-preemptive, request driven multi-tasking capability.  I will explain
what I mean by that later.

MTASK was written and donated to the public domain by Wayne E. Conrad
(me) in November of 1988.  I may be contact via my BBS,

     Pascalaholics Anonymous
     (602) 484-9356
     300/1200/2400 bps
     24 hours/day

or by mail at my home:

     2627 North 51st Ave, #219
     Phoenix, AZ  85035

I am interested in any modifications, bug reports, or comments you have.

If you modify this package, please keep my name and the name of any
other programmers who've worked on it intact.  Please distribute the
complete ARC file, with documentation and demonstration programs
included.



1.1 INTRODUCTION


MTASK allows your Turbo Pascal program to do simple multi-tasking.  I
call MTASK's brand of multi-tasking "non-preemptive, request driven."

Preemptive is a fairly common phrase, meaning that the switch from one
task to another can happen at almost any time.  Most preemptive systems
have an interrupt driver hooked to a hardware timer, which causes a task
switch every time the hardware timer goes off.  The advantage of this
kind of multi-tasking is that your programs don't have to be written
with multi-tasking in mind, and don't even have to know that its taking
place.  Also, no program can hog the system for long, because the
interrupt driver switches from one program to another fairly often.
Desqview and Double-DOS are programs that do preemptive,
interrupt-driven multi-tasking.  The disadvantage of this kind of
multi-t