A-EON Interview about Amiga's future - Distrita

[KimmoK]

For me, AmigaOS + SW was about 90% of what 68k Amiga Computer meant to me.
In the end, CBM manufactured HW part of my A4k system was the thing holding it back to please my growing needs. With NG PPC HW I've been able to continue with the 90% of Amiga.

(it would be easier if late 90's I had dropped the desire to handle modern data with miggy)

[KimmoK]

True. Any task can take over the system and turn off multitasking so it is not secure but it is preemptive multitasking by definition. Responsiveness was traded for security.
... The AmigaOS is one of the best and most responsive OSs at multitasking (near real time OS made the Toaster possible). Code reuse and modularity are also top notch even today. The AmigaOS trades security for speed and ease of use.
... Compare the AmigaOS to the DOS+Windows, MacOS, RiscOS and the Amiga has less growing pains and more speed. ....

Nice thread & nice post.

Never thought that the ability to stop task switching for a while is one of the reasons why AOS has been so wickedly fast (responsive).

Instead of NG developments done behind closed doors I would love to see alternative kernels etc. and some recompiled apps for it, for user community to try, to see how they can behave.

When we now have Ghz instead of Mhz to play with, there should be room to take "slower" ways in use without being slower than the fastest multitasker and responder OS+HW of y1990.

++
Also... when thinking of multicore systems. IMO: server OSs (Linux, Unix, OSX, NT) have taken SMP in use without considering if it would give better responsives if some core is put to deliver the user experience (dedicated to it heavily, if not totally).
I'm thinking that if the SW that is responsible for user experience (responsiveness) would have very high priority on some core, it more likely has the data it needs on the L2 cache etc.... IMO, some OS need several cores at 2Ghz to say "tada", so focusing stuff on only one core might not be good idea for that kind of mammoth OS. But I think for some OS (that almost fits in L2 cache of a core) it might work better.

[KimmoK]

Buffers & 68k AOS multitasking...
In late 90's some people burned CDs with their pretty basic A2000 computers while on x86 200Mhz was said to be the absolute minimum. That's because the low overhead on Amiga.
At that time also I burned CDs with my A4000/060. I did not have burnProof capable CDRW drive (nor burner SW supporting burnproof). I had to use pretty large buffer so that A4000 had time to transfer enough data with some 4x burn speed. And .iso had to be prepared beforehand. But it was possible and worked reliably with just 50Mhz.
IIRC, with 060/50 I did not need to have very large buffers. And I think I had executive shuffling all my heavy tasks to lower priority automatically. near-realtime needing apps were automatically left as they were or they were promoted higher than 0 priority.

To me Amiga of late 90's was unusable without executive as I used multitasking very heavily all the time.

hehe... and the classic.... trying to handle a floppy disk with x86 was a nightmare always vs how it worked on Amiga ... floppy or serial I/O could destroy x86 computer responsiveness totally, while Amigas did not show any negative effect.
(actually, even today, USB still kills my i5 laptop responsiveness sometimes, nothing seem to run runs beside Win kernel...)