5 ms·

I think the Amiga was much more expandable than Atari. Just check out the variety of accelerator boards, RTG graphics cards, serial boards, HD controllers, etc.

I think the Amiga was much more expandable than Atari. Just check out the variety of accelerator boards, RTG graphics cards, serial boards, HD controllers, etc. available. The Atari OS (TOS) was also very simple compared to Amiga OS.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I think that's oversimplified. TOS was single tasking but two things a) unlike the Amiga a proper 68000 syscall TRAP mechanism was used meaning the OS etc ran using proper supervisor / user separation and b) the application toolkit (AES) built overtop supported message passing and multiple application semantics and c) the graphics subsystem (VDI) was also in theory abstracted away from the physical. In fact the OS components themselves had originally been developed (by Digital Research) for both x86 and 68000 and the original work was done on the Lisa before it ever got put on a Atari hardware. And DR's GEM had a life of its own on PC hardware (see Ventura Publisher, etc.), though handicapped by the Apple lawsuit and competition from Microsoft. These things meant that later the Atari community and Atari themselves were able to extend the OS in a proper multitasking almost Unix-like direction (MiNT and MultiGEM) and bring it to new hardware, and new display formats and architectures, etc. Provided the applications being run were cleanly written (well, that's a big caveat...). For example -- we can now run TOS/GEM on an Amiga, that's pretty neat (though totally pointless). In true Tramiel fashion they shipped the cheapest simplest thing they could. But it was something they were able to iterate on -- unfortunately they just did this too slowly. As others have pointed out, the Amiga had amazing hardware from the go, but its architecture became somewhat tied to that original hardware. It was more like a video games console than a workstation. They had a few years headstart on everyone else and then having (then dated) specialized hardware became a liability, not an advantage.
- rjsw 6y ago
  The Atari ST could do the same kind of cooperative multitasking as GEM on a PC. I built MicroGNUEmacs as a desk accessory so that I could run it at the same time as other programs.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    I always found it odd that the GEM environment supported this kind of cooperative multitasking by default only for desk accessories. The API support for doing it more broadly was there, but the desktop and all the applications were written so they would not be. So even when we got proper multitasking support under MiNT there were few/no applications that behaved well in this scenario. I never saw uemacs compiled as a DA. That would have been a nice trick. The only microemacs I used on my ST was not a windowed application, was console only.
    - rjsw 6y ago
      It wasn't a trick to compile mgemacs as a desk accessory, it took a bit of work. I still have the SH204 HD from back then so have the source code, just don't have a ST to read it. I chose the MicroGNU variant as it did parenthesis matching better than the alternatives. I ran it alongside Franz Lisp that I had also made into a GEM application.
- icedchai 6y ago
  I think AmigaOS felt more sophisticated to an end-user: preemptive multitasking, shared libraries (Atari didn't get these until very late, right?), loadable filesystems, autoconfig / plug-n-play type device drivers, command line / shell. I'm sure TOS could get many of these things with add ons.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

I think that's oversimplified. TOS was single tasking but two things a) unlike the Amiga a proper 68000 syscall TRAP mechanism was used meaning the OS etc ran using proper supervisor / user separation and b) the application toolkit (AES) built overtop supported message passing and multiple application semantics and c) the graphics subsystem (VDI) was also in theory abstracted away from the physical. In fact the OS components themselves had originally been developed (by Digital Research) for both x86 and 68000 and the original work was done on the Lisa before it ever got put on a Atari hardware. And DR's GEM had a life of its own on PC hardware (see Ventura Publisher, etc.), though handicapped by the Apple lawsuit and competition from Microsoft. These things meant that later the Atari community and Atari themselves were able to extend the OS in a proper multitasking almost Unix-like direction (MiNT and MultiGEM) and bring it to new hardware, and new display formats and architectures, etc. Provided the applications being run were cleanly written (well, that's a big caveat...). For example -- we can now run TOS/GEM on an Amiga, that's pretty neat (though totally pointless). In true Tramiel fashion they shipped the cheapest simplest thing they could. But it was something they were able to iterate on -- unfortunately they just did this too slowly. As others have pointed out, the Amiga had amazing hardware from the go, but its architecture became somewhat tied to that original hardware. It was more like a video games console than a workstation. They had a few years headstart on everyone else and then having (then dated) specialized hardware became a liability, not an advantage.

rjsw 6y ago
The Atari ST could do the same kind of cooperative multitasking as GEM on a PC. I built MicroGNUEmacs as a desk accessory so that I could run it at the same time as other programs.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  I always found it odd that the GEM environment supported this kind of cooperative multitasking by default only for desk accessories. The API support for doing it more broadly was there, but the desktop and all the applications were written so they would not be. So even when we got proper multitasking support under MiNT there were few/no applications that behaved well in this scenario. I never saw uemacs compiled as a DA. That would have been a nice trick. The only microemacs I used on my ST was not a windowed application, was console only.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    It wasn't a trick to compile mgemacs as a desk accessory, it took a bit of work. I still have the SH204 HD from back then so have the source code, just don't have a ST to read it. I chose the MicroGNU variant as it did parenthesis matching better than the alternatives. I ran it alongside Franz Lisp that I had also made into a GEM application.
icedchai 6y ago
I think AmigaOS felt more sophisticated to an end-user: preemptive multitasking, shared libraries (Atari didn't get these until very late, right?), loadable filesystems, autoconfig / plug-n-play type device drivers, command line / shell. I'm sure TOS could get many of these things with add ons.