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I am a huge Amiga fan, but the Amiga was going nowhere and was never going to win. The OS is just as terrible as classic Windows and MacOS from a reliability st

I am a huge Amiga fan, but the Amiga was going nowhere and was never going to win. The OS is just as terrible as classic Windows and MacOS from a reliability standpoint; yes not using a message pump for timeslicing was a really nice property but in most ways the design was _worse_ in terms of any hope of eventually getting memory protection in place. I love the Amiga - it represented a unique point in time that coalesced a lot of interesting technologies and people together trying to do something interesting - but it was as far from a technology that had long term potential as you could get, pretty much in every way.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Ironically, the Atari ST's OS -- much maligned as 'primitive' by Amiga users -- was not like this. It had a proper syscall mechanism through TRAPs -- so proper 68000 architecture memory protection entirely possible with user/supervisor separation etc etc -- and an event loop with message passing (tho rarely used). Later extensions to add unix-like multitasking (MiNT -> FreeMiNT) actually ended up fairly elegant, and memory protection is a possibility for some things. My understanding is that AmigaOS syscalls were basically JSRs? The original shipped OS was basically a fork of CP/M and PC-DOS-ish but GEM overtop of it showed more attention to cleaner architectural concerns, though it was never really used to its full intent.
actionfromafar 2y ago
I was a die hard Amiga fan and I agree. The way to memory protection on some “what could have been” Amiga, would have been running a copy of the OS for every application and change the IPC if you wanted two programs to talk to each other