9 ms·
And it worked, well, with 512K memory in 1985. The multitasking was co-operative, and there was no paging or memory protection. That didn't work as well (But w
by beagle3 6y ago
And it worked, well, with 512K memory in 1985.
The multitasking was co-operative, and there was no paging or memory protection. That didn't work as well (But worked surprisingly well, especially compared to Win3.1 which came 5-6 years later and needed much more memory to be usable).
I suspect if Commodore/Amiga had done a cheaper version and did not suck so badly at planning and management, we would have been much farther along on software and hardware by now. The Amiga had 4 channel 8-bit DMA stereo sound in 1985 (which with some effort could become 13-bit 2 channel DMA stereo sound), a working multitasking system, 12-bit color high resolution graphics, and more. I think the PC had these specs as "standard" only in 1993 or so, and by "standard" I mean "you could assume there was hardware to support them, but your software needed to include specific support for at least two or three different vendors, such as Creative Labs SoundBlaster and Gravis UltraSound for sound).
- pjmlp 6y agoWe have to "thank" Compaq for it as well. Even with all its management flaws, the Amiga might have survived without the mass production of PC clones.
- icedchai 6y agoAmiga multitasking was actually preemptive. It was only cooperative in the sense that all processes / tasks were in the same address space and without memory protection...
- jswny 6y agoBetween the preemptive multitasking and purely message-based communication it sounds a lot like Erlang.
- atombender 6y agoSomething else that's mentioned less than the hardware side is AmigaDOS and AmigaShell, which were considerably more sophisticated than MS-DOS, and closer to Unix in power (e.g. scripting, pipes, etc.). The fate of Amiga is so infuriating. It's mind-boggling to think how Microsoft was able to dominate for so long with clearly inferior technology, while vastly superior tech (NeXT, Amiga, BeOS) lost out. There are many such unhappy stories, and I often think about the millions of hours spent on building tech that should have conquered the world, but didn't. The macOS platform is a rare incidence of something (NeXT) eventually winning out, but the Amiga was a different kind of dead end.
- kstrauser 6y agoMy first Linux box felt pretty comfortable after cutting my teeth on an Amiga's shell, which was largely inspired by Unix and still similar enough in concepts to make the transition easy.
- nwah1 6y agomacOS may have technical advantages, though less and less over time. But it always had a dramatically more restrictive business model from the very beginning. This is what made it unattractive to business and continues to make it unattractive to many. The restrictiveness of Apple is likely an advantage for novice mobile users, and other vendors copied it.
- eecc 6y agoTrue, but as I read from more knowledgeable sources than myself, the problem of the Amiga was that the software was intimately linked to and effectively exposed hardware implementation details. This made upgrading chips nigh impossible without full software rewrites, which ultimately caused stagnation. Indeed, as an A500 kid I used to laugh and was horrified by my first PC...
- gpderetta 6y agoI think the multitasking was actually preemptive. But yes, it had no memory protection: the message passing infrastructure relied on it and it would have been very hard to retrofit even on cpus with an MMU (although I think recent versions might have actually tried).
- flohofwoe 6y agoMinor nitpick: The Amiga had preemptive multitasking (and thus didn't depend on user code to willingly give up their time slice, in that regard it was more like UNIX, and unlike early Windows and MacOS versions).
- vram22 6y agoAnother amazing thing is that Carl Sassenrath, creator of the Amiga OS kernel, also went on to create the REBOL language, which seemed quite innovative too - I've checked it out some - though it is kind of dormant now, and now there is the Red language, based somewhat on REBOL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath