Stewart Stremler wrote:
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$, and they blew off C='s coding guidelines,
that, among other things, recommended against doing the obvious thing
on a machine with a 24-bit address space and 32 bit pointers (making a
linked list where each node was exactly 32 bits).
M$? That explains some of its quirkiness, why some of the commands
didn't quite do what they were supposed to do.
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. :)
Agreed. And by upgrading the KickStart ROM from v1.2 to v1.3, I saw the
Guru much less. (Although Marble Madness stopped working altogether
after that. :-( )
[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...
Agreed.
But my favorite thing about Amiga was that neither the video nor the
audio ever froze while the system needed to catch up on something else.
It understood that there are nearly *zero* items that should have
priority over that. The PC seems to *still* not grasp this. Although
the CD burner was virtually unheard of back then, a buffer under-run is
the only thing I can think of that should interfere with video and audio
playback.
The Amiga 500 had only 3 interrupts. But there were 25 dma channels on
the video chip alone. The Amiga saw the importance of DMA among other
things, and removed virtually all the bottlenecks.
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$/IBM project.
Yes, until M$ went stir crazy and saw the killing OS/2 would make. And
IBM didn't give M$ nearly the same rights with OS/2 that they did with
DOS. Back when IBM purchased the "license" for DOS, they thought there
was very little money to be made with the OS. They weren't going to
make that mistake with OS/2. It's unfortunate that M$ has *any* rights
to OS/2. It would tickle me half to death if IBM would release the OS/2
code to the public domain. What a boon to Wine that would be!
[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.
Really? I don't remember the guru allowing you to do anything but
reboot (by clicking a mouse button IIRC).
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