4 ms·
Are you sure? By the time Windows 95 came out, the Amiga was looking pretty long in the tooth.
by icedchai 5y ago
Are you sure? By the time Windows 95 came out, the Amiga was looking pretty long in the tooth.
- bitwize 5y agoWindows 95 ran like a dog compared to Amiga. PCs couldn't match a 25-MHz Amiga for responsiveness until they were in the hundreds of MHz in the late nineties.
- kstrauser 5y agoThat’s so true. Amiga didn’t have an RTOS, but it sure felt like it. Windows had so much latency in comparison that I couldn’t bear to use it for the longest time.
- AlanYx 5y agoThe maneuver that always astounded me at the time was right clicking on the menu bar and pulling it down, to reveal whatever application was open on the "screen" behind it. (The Amiga had separate windows and screen abstractions, though I don't recall if I'm using the right terms.) No matter how heavily loaded the system was, whether it was doing floppy I/O at the time, etc., that pull down motion never became choppy. It did feel a lot like an RTOS in that respect. You could overload the system in other ways though, particularly disk I/O in Workbench.
- kstrauser 5y agoThose are the right terms. Even more mind blowing is that the visible screens could have different resolutions. The display hardware could switch modes per scanline while keeping the same output frequencies, so you could have a low-res/high-color screen on the top half of the monitor with a high-res/low-color screen on the bottom half.
- rasz 5y agoThose are your memories. Win95 on contemporary 1995 Pentium system will display explorer window full of icons in split second. Workbench when opening a HDD drawer will paint icons one at a time taking several seconds, even with fastest accelerators possible and fast cf IDE drive.
- anthk 5y ago>1995 Pentium system Then bitwise is right.
- squarefoot 5y agoThe reason behind Win95 showing icons much faster than any Amiga was due to the relatively slow filesystem used by the Amiga, not by its hardware speed, which in fact was a bit faster than PCs in a MHz to MHz comparison.
- bcrl 5y agoThe complete lack of a disk cache integrated with the OS on the Amiga hurt as well. Even MS-DOS was shipping with disk caching software to make use of high memory on 386 systems in the early 1990s when AmigaOS had just launched 2.04.
- icedchai 5y agoAlso the Amiga was slow due to the simplistic way metadata / icons were handled. There was a separate "file.info" file, containing the icon and some other metadata, for each actual file on disk.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoHad to do with whether you had 4mb of RAM or 8 or more. 4 was unusable.
- dekhn 5y agothat was 4 years later, which was an aeon in internet time.
- icedchai 5y agoWell, you said "10 years later" after 1991, which would put us at 2001-ish.
- dekhn 5y agoDuh, yes I see now. I actually went away from DOS/Windows between 1993 and 2001+, so I don't know much about what their UI was doing at that point. I really meant it took Linux desktops a long time to be as useful as Amigas (and even then you would have to find a compatible video capture board, compatible 3d graphics card, etc).