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[warpdesign]

Since the OS didn't allow to share lots of resources (sound access was exclusive for example), it also limits what can be done using multitasking. No way to run two apps accessing paula for example...

Oh, and btw if one app that was using Paula and/or lots of chip memory crashes, you're good for a reboot... That's where features like resource tracking come handy. Not to mention your memory could be trashed even though everything appears to work perfectly (memory protection, anyone ?).

No one says it wasn't great in 1985. But it's seriously lacking important features today.

[itix]

Originally Posted by warpdesign

Since the OS didn't allow to share lots of resources (sound access was exclusive for example), it also limits what can be done using multitasking. No way to run two apps accessing paula for example...

It is not exclusive and two or more applications could play sound simultaneously. Audio.device has priority based channel allocation system where application with a higher allocation priority get an access to one or more audio channels. Applications which allocated a sound channel with lesser priority just wen silent.

But Amiga applications rarely had any use for audio and games and music software of course required all available channels.

That's where features like resource tracking come handy.

Without memory protection it is useless. It only causes the snowball effect.

[psxphill]

Originally Posted by desiv

I used many of the options available at the time, and the Amiga wasn't any less stable, and was (IMHO) much more usable.

It wasn't more usable because of the pre-emptive multitasking though. Especially when running code that did Forbid() or Disable(), which because of the OS design pretty much every program had to.

MacOS and Windows were slower because of the lack of hardware accelerated graphics & using PIO instead of DMA etc.

Doing things in hardware instead of software is a cost/performance tradeoff that works all the time you have a slow CPU. However Windows and a lesser extent MacOS could be made faster simply by selling machines with the latest CPU. While commodore had to fund the development of their chipset themselves.

Relying on third parties to develop faster graphics chips is a much better business model.

[lassie]

Originally Posted by gertsy

The first Amiga (to be known as the Amiga 1000) was special. Revolutionary.

Memory was the ceiling for multitasking for all PCs until relatively recently (Last 12 years) Because it was so expensive and usually programs were written to use all that a standard configuration supplied.
Windows 95 had 32 Bit preemptive multitasking with 32 Bit application protection. But you needed a lot of memory to run multiple programs. Luckily you couldn't install pizz poor marketing bullcrap onboard most MBs.

Hi was Windows 95 not one of the first "good" Windows?

[MiAmigo]

Originally Posted by lassie

Hi was Windows 95 not one of the first "good" Windows?

My personal vote would actually go to Windows 98SE. Windows 95 did introduce a new, much more sleek and streamlined interface, which became the de facto standard for a long time, basically changing over from the clunky old 'kindergarten' style of 3.1.

[lassie]

Originally Posted by MiAmigo

My personal vote would actually go to Windows 98SE. Windows 95 did introduce a new, much more sleek and streamlined interface, which became the de facto standard for a long time, basically changing over from the clunky old 'kindergarten' style of 3.1.

Are there 2 versions of Windows 98?

[MiAmigo]

Originally Posted by lassie

Are there 2 versions of Windows 98?

Yes, 'SE' stands for Second Edition.

[lassie]

Originally Posted by MiAmigo

Yes, 'SE' stands for Second Edition.

I still have a PC with Windows 98, so i can play older games, but i do not know if it is SE or not i have heard that Windows 2000 and Windows Vista is some of the worst of the newer Windows.

[spirantho]

You're confusing Windows 2000 - which was the good bits of NT without the bad bits of XP (but with hardly any drivers) - with Windows ME which was .. er, well, rubbish, basically.

[commodorejohn]

95 was a huge advancement over 3.1, but it was sorta only halfway to NT, so it wasn't particularly stable as a result. Light as hell, though, for modern 32-bit Windows. 98 and 98SE were heavier by quite a bit, but also much stabler.

2000 I've been playing around with, and I'm quite impressed at how light and responsive it is, and solid as a rock; I wish this had been the OS that took off and gained popularity rather than XP, then there'd be better, newer hardware I could run it on.

[lassie]

Originally Posted by spirantho

You're confusing Windows 2000 - which was the good bits of NT without the bad bits of XP (but with hardly any drivers) - with Windows ME which was .. er, well, rubbish, basically.

Yes it was Windows ME i was thinking of. Everybody was looking forward to the new Millenium Edition. But it did not quite live up to the expectations

[desiv]

Originally Posted by psxphill

It wasn't more usable because of the pre-emptive multitasking though..

Yes it was...
At least for me and people I knew.

Just being able to have a Word Processor and Terminal program running at the same time.
And then the ability to play a WB friendly (usually the little ones) on top of that....

I could be watching the progress of a ZModem download while typing a doc, without having to task switch...

It was more usable in many ways to me...

desiv

[persia]

Microsoft said they couldn't produce what they needed to produce out of DOS/Windows, they needed to switch to NT. ME was the proof.

[spirantho]

Originally Posted by lassie

Yes it was Windows ME i was thinking of. Everybody was looking forward to the new Millenium Edition. But it did not quite live up to the expectations

Quite the contrary... my expectation was that it would be dreadful. I wasn't disappointed
2000 was the first Windows that was properly usable to me, and I used it as long as I could before being forced onto xp.

Luckily I always had my Miggy to keep me sane, though!

[Digiman]

Well it is possible to add 8mb to any OCS Amiga giving 8.5mb total back in the 80s, your average PC in those days was 4mb MAX. So given the file sizes even of VGA/HAM pictures an extra 8mb over chip ram is A LOT. Hard drives were only like 20 or 40mb ram to put it in perspective for top end machines.

As for the 6510 based C64 doing multitasking, yeh sure and a Sinclair C5 has 4 wheels so is as good as driving to the shops in a real car lol. With a relocatable zero page only the 6509 based Tandy 8bits can multitask effectively, other than that the only reasonable method is SymbOS for the Z80 based MSX2 or Amstrad CPC 8 bit computers (Z80 has ability to move zero page)#

Virtual memory was sort of a good idea when 24bit images first appeared on 286/386 machines with 4mb but today the legacy is hurting Windows, the system is designed around it even though you could build a 64gb PC. It is soo deep down in the code that switching it off even if you don't need it (why would you need it with 64GB of RAM) actually impacts Windows performance IME.

And I hope we all know that around the time of Kickstart 2.0 that Commodore and IBM shared information, they got exclusive access to how Kickstart/Workbench works and we got AREXX (IBMs REXX for Amiga) so OS/2 improved quite a bit before Windows 95 as was easily the most efficient multitasking OS on PC. It even done a better job of playing DOS games than MS-DOS through it's virtual DOS sessions with 640kb RAM assigned to them with nothing lost for the usual drivers you had to load.

Also people always say Win2000 is better than XP but unless you only had 64mb (a paltry amount in 2002 when XP was in use) it booted faster and thrashed the disk a lot less than 2000 on all the 100s of laptops I tried it on over the decade of sales of computers and laptops I managed. Don't ask me why. Maybe 32mb or 64mb limited machines are better but XP Professional had no other disadvantage on SP1. XP SP1 is REALLY fast actually, but you are stopped from installing things like Chrome browser etc (but not Firefox though).