The Amiga's platform is a model of efficiency. Ignash provides an example:
Running on only a 7-MHz processor (today, even a 233-MHz machine is starting
to look a little slow to high-end users), Ignash said he browses the Web
with the machine, "with graphics on."
But how? "The OS was written from the ground up to be multitasking," Ignash
said. "It wasn't trying to be backward compatible to an OS like MS-DOS,
which is a single-tasking system."
Another example is the use of so-called "shared libraries" -- reusable
program functions that different programs call on to do common OS tasks.
Windows 95, for example, knows these as .DLL files. But the Amiga's handling
of such libraries is unique.
"When [the Amiga operating system] loads up shared libraries, it only has to
load them once," Ignash said. "It doesn't have to load them at boot like the
Mac. It just loads them up as needed then flushes them when it doesn't need
them any more."
Proof of the Amiga's unparalleled technological prowess came with its early
success in video. In the early 1990s, when the average PC couldn't display,
let alone edit, video, producers quickly took to the still-available Video
Toaster, a specially adapted Amiga, getting high-end, high-quality video
compositing and editing capabilities for a comparatively inexpensive
US$6,000.
Suddenly video artists had dream capabilities within budget reach. "We were
one of the first places to buy one," said Kate Johnson, president of EZTV,
an avant-garde video production company and digital art center. "We used it
mainly for its computer graphics capability. It's fast, it's easy to use,
and it does a great number of things in real time that takes other programs
a long time to do. And it's fairly crash proof."
The list of Amiga credits goes on. A file system that was ready to manage
disks with gigabytes worth of data on them -- this when a 30-megabyte hard
disk was considered big. Also, video capability demanded drives that could
be accessed quickly: Thus, many Amigas had fast drive ports built in
(so-called "wide" SCSI ports) where the drive controller was located near
the processor, circumventing "bus" circuitry that would otherwise slow them
down.
"On the PC, some of these things have just become popular in the last two
years. Well, they were on the Amiga in 1985," Ignash said. "They [the
Amiga's creators] were always forward-looking when they were designing
things."
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