begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 02:50:24AM -0700: [snip] > Then I became familiar with Amiga, and often programmed (simple things) > in BASIC and became very familiar with the CLI commands. (Many Guru > visits. Not so stable. But nice.)
AmigaBASIC? That was from M$, and they blew off C='s coding guidelines, that, among other things, recommended against doing the obvious thing on a machine with a 24-bit address space and 32 bit pointers (making a linked list where each node was exactly 32 bits). Consequently, AmigaBASIC broke, and broke hard, on later processors. As for stablity, I found the Amiga to be *very* stable, once unstable programs were thrown out. By ruthlessly discarding programs that would put the system into an unstable state, average program quality on the system would increase. If you ran just anything, yeah, it was really easy to crash the system. But it didn't take long to reboot either. :) [snip] > no matter how much the PC advanced or how much Windows advanced, I never > saw Windows on the PC perform nearly as well (graphics and sound) as the > Amiga. However, regarding lockups, I don't remember if Windows or Amiga > was worse. Regarding virus vulnerability, I think Windows is second > only to the Amiga. Indeed. The Amiga loaded and ran the bootblock of a floppy when the floppy disk was inserted and auto-discovered. Clever, but just screaming "make a virus here". This is one of the reasons I *really* dislike "live data". I would not consider the Amiga anything more than a single-user system; it was too wide-open for anything else. It was a very light nougat center and a barely-crunchy outside... > Then OS/2 came out. But Microsoft's FUD went into high gear to make > people believe that a few months later Windows 94 (IIRC) would blow the > doors off of OS/2 and caused everyone to hold off. A few months turned > into several, and Windows 94 was in danger of turning into Windows 96. > But by the time it was finally released, it was called Windows 95 > (barely). And it barely held a candle to OS/2. OS/2 was solid. I never could run OS/2 on my hardware. My 386 was too weak, and OS/2 ran like a dog. A friend of mine had a faster system, and he loved OS/2. I found it interesting that OS/2 was a joint M$/IBM project. [snip] > Microsoft is great at creating sludge, but masters of spin. A dollar spent on marketing is worth five spent on engineering. You don't dominate the market by producing a quality product; this is the downside of a free-market economy. It's not certain that any other system would work better, either. [snip] > My most recent frustration with Windows was that Vista refused to allow > me to install a software firewall that I could trust. I do *NOT* trust > Microsoft's built in firewall. I think I will install a router in > between my friend's laptop and her cable modem, though I doubt that this > will stop Vista from sending spy data back to Microsoft, but what can > you do? I do not trust Microsoft, at all. I've been impressed with the Mac Mini. Small, quiet, and Good Enough for most stuff. [snip] > Even considering the many Guru visits on my Amiga, I must agree. I miss the Guru some days. Much nicer than the grind-to-a-halt-and-lock-up stuff I get. -- Have you tried AmiWM? Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
