@ Florida.... Interesting question...
I was decompressing a DMS file to DF0: the other day whilst at the same time trying to create a new drawer on my HD. When creating the Drawer the floppy disk writing would stop until I'd completely finished creating the drawer and let go off the right mouse button.
This made me think twice about workbench being a truly multi tasking OS?? Which I'd always being led to believe it was....Does the floppy disk stop writing simply because of limited processing power and creating the drawer gets priority??
AmigaOS is a proper multitasking operating system.
Workbench is an application running in AmigaOS.
Workbench 1.x is really rather rubbish and single-threaded, hence the 'serialised' behaviour being witnessed when accessing built-in Workbench functionality. In the case of file system access it is possible that Workbench grabs a lock on the entire HD until you've done your folder creation - I don't know the exact means Workbench works. If you do a mkdir in AmigaShell whilst DMSing, does that behave the same?
If you run, for example, a MOD player, a fractal program, and more, at the same time from workbench, then they don't stop when you do something in Workbench, although sharing resources will slow the fractal program down, and without priorities on the processes the MOD player could be starved by a very intensive process taking up all the CPU resources.
