Thomas: Nonsense. What you see when Windows if fully loaded is called desktop. So if you are looking for counterparts you can compare "AmigaOS" to "Windows" and "Workbench" to "desktop".
Actually, it's Explorer (explorer.exe). You can use different 3rd party desktop managers for Windows.
The philisophy behind the Windows desktop and the Amiga Workbench is different, though. Workbench works more like the Windows "My Computer" folder, i.e. it uses the directory structure of the file system for its drawers (although by default it only shows files with icons) while the Windows desktop is a complete abstraction layer between the user interface and the file system.
Sort of. Different versions of Windows handle the visibility of files in different ways. By default, files will be shows directly on a Windows desktop unless there's a filter applied to mask certain files or show files that don't actually exist.
Workbench (much like MacOS), is more like the abstraction layer. Files exist in multiple places on the drive but show up on the desktop if you drag them there. This is why you can "put away" icons from a Workbench screen, and programs can "iconize". Windows doesn't really do things that way, though you can make it do things like that with the proper ClassID patch. I think you have to have seperate ClassIDs for each behavior, while AmigaOS is more generalized.
The "filesystems" of the Amiga ROM and RAM disk also have their own special properties, and some resources can be accessed through special assigns. The Windows filesystem and desktop aren't as clever. Don't even get me started about the Registry, which has to be one of the worst things Microsoft ever did to Windows.
mpiva: MS-DOS = AmigaDOS (Command Prompt = CLI/Shell)
The nice thing about MS-DOS, though, is that the entire shell and a bunch of critical commands are all integrated into COMMAND.COM. With AmigaDOS, the shell and commands are seperate, which is why it's frustrating to get a directory listing on an Amiga floppy disk if there's no dir command on that floppy. It would've been SO much better if those commands were included in the shell itself, like MS-DOS. Of course, almost everything else about MS-DOS sucked. ;-)
motorollin: That's not true. In Win95, DOS is only used to boot the system. Once the Win95 kernel is loaded, this replaces the DOS functions with its own.
Sort of. To maintain backwards compatibility with DOS and software that didn't run in protected mode, Win95 was a hybrid mess which ran more than one kernel (Kernel16 and Kernel32). It wasn't stable, but it was a clever piece of work to add protected mode to the OS, unlike what Apple was doing (nothing until OSX, basicly).
The NT kernel is truly DOS free, thank goodness.
Tomas: It does boot straight into WB even on a old a500 when using a HD.
If you tell it to. Without startup sequence, you have to know what you are doing. :-)
Tomas: I think that Workbench/AmigaOS is superiour to even Windows9x/ME and it still have quite a few advantages over modern Win2k/XP as well.
Application framework doesn't even come close. On OS3, technically, you had to start ARexx manually. It's also easy to give AmigaOS the thumbs up for efficiency, but remember that it only works on one basic hardware platform, and has large amounts of assembler, which is precicely why OS4 has taken forever to port. It was great in its heyday, but priorities are very different today.
Also note that Windows is a very cautious OS (really), and keeps logs of everything to weed out infinite loops on startup. AmigaOS will just crash over and over and you have to do a Ctrl-D and poke around your startup sequence to find the problem. Windows will also queue files that need to be patched on startup, while most other OSes require you to boot into a maintenance mode and poke around with the internals in rather unsafe ways (AmigaOS doesn't even have a maintenance mode!)
Windows has lots of problems, especially when it comes to reinstallation and Microsoft's paranoia about being able to boot off a removable disk, but there's a lot of design points Amiga and UNIX fans could learn about proper user interaction. For one, being able to update drivers by running an installer. I
hate updating Linux drivers, and AmigaOS, as usual, requires startup-sequence splices. It's amazing how little progress has been made in this area!
InTheSand: The Amiga's windowing environment (called Intuition) is mostly built into the Kickstart ROM chips. If you own a working Amiga with working ROMs, you already have the bulk of the OS.
Correct. Shell commands exist on the disks, though, and they're not much fun if "resident" isn't available. That's also why AmigaOS is so miserly with memory. When you open a library, it's opened directly from the ROM. I wish Windows did more of this. Microsoft has a love affair with "services", which takes up the majority of resources. On a clean install of Windows, more than half of the services are definately not required; they just waste memory. It's like having 1,000 printer drivers preinstalled on your hard drive. 99% or more of them will never be used, and if you buy a printer, you'll have to install new drivers, anyway, but hey... JUST IN CASE!
leirbag28: Workbench and AmigaOS are exactly the same thing...in the beginning it was called Workbench (sometimes referred to as Intuition) but now is called AmigaOS...........dont listen to what anyone else tells you.....they will confuse you with technical jargon.
The technical jargon is confusing, but the point is that the desktop/window manager isn't really part of an OS. There's no hard line between where the OS ends and the desktop begins. AmigaOS can run just fine without Workbench. On a Linux box, Linux is a kernel, GNU is the OS, and the X Window System is the desktop (aka Graphics Server). Hell, at this point, people still can't agree if a web browser (system browser?) is part of the OS or not, because on Windows, Explorer and Intenet Explorer share the same base libraries. Microsoft just did a better job of modularizing the technology after the Mandatory Browser fiasco.
leirbag28: Kickstart on Amiga = BIOS chip on PC
I'm not sure if Kickstart refers to just the bootstrap or the booter + ROM image. On the A1000, the Kickstart disk is the actual AmigaOS "ROM", and the bootstrap is in the hardware. I guess it varies from system to system -- more blurred lines and technical nit-picking.
Bloodline: Not really... The kickstart is a combination if a BIOS and a Boot disk... The PC BIOS also has some nonvolatile memory that the Amiga does not have.
Oh yeah. The nice thing about a PC BIOS is that you can customize it and save your changes. It would be real nice if I could tell my 1200 to always boot in PAL mode. One of these days I'll look up a hardware hack.
Of course, on most PCs, if you lose the power while flashing the BIOS, or your memory timings are wrong, you're toast. Here's a tip: don't mess with memory timings on an nForce2 motherboard. The siren sound you hear sounds like an ambulance for a reason, and holding the Insert key doesn't always work. My first Athlon system was a nightmare!
Bloodline: Or better get WinUAE...
It depends how hardcore you are. I'm a softie. I just want to click a button to turn it on and have it run on a real VGA monitor. It makes it easy to restart if it crashes, too, without worrying about the "click of death" that wipes out your hard drive. Shadow of the Beast wiped out my real Amiga HD once, and boy was I mad (this was before DiskSalv, too!) :-)
