Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: lassie on August 28, 2012, 04:40:52 PM
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I find it quite cool that Amiga in 1985 could multitask, with as low as 250 kb ram, not even Windows 3.1 could multitask, you could only use one program at the time. The Amiga was ahead of its time in 1985, and some years to come :-) I only wish i had an Amiga 1000 :-) it looks like a nice machine. Are any of you lucky enough to own an Amiga 1000?
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I find it quite cool than Amiga in 1985 could multitask
Preemptive multitasking is nothing special, any CPU that can save registers, program counter and stack pointer can do it. That means machines such as the C64, MSX, and other 8 bitters can do preemptive multitasking as well :)
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That means machines such as the C64, MSX, and other 8 bitters can do preemptive multitasking as well :)
"Can do" and "actually did" are different.
I believe he is saying he is impressed that the Amiga actually did it..
And yes, it was impressive. The Amiga OS was a very impressive step forward at the time.
No, it wasn't the only multi-tasking OS at the time, but for the market and the functionality, it was really incredible...
Yep, I have and love my A1000...
Great machine..
desiv
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And yes, it was impressive. The Amiga OS was a very impressive step forward at the time.
It was the first time most people got to use a pre-emptive multi tasking computer in the comfort of their own home. So in that regard it was impressive.
Windows was not a big deal for Microsoft in 1985, they joined forces with IBM to make OS/2 & that was supposed to be the next big thing. But five years later and people were still buying Windows and not OS/2. Microsoft chased the money and while it gained them customers, they didn't produce the most technically compelling products. But in business it's customers that are happy to keep giving you money that count.
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I only wish i had an Amiga 1000 :-) it looks like a nice machine. Are any of you lucky enough to own an Amiga 1000?
I still have my original A1000 purchased new in 86 or so.... it's resting in it's box right now. ;-) retired after years of service.
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I still have my original A1000 purchased new in 86 or so.... it's resting in it's box right now. ;-) retired after years of service.
Do you ever power it up to see if it still works :)
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"Can do" and "actually did" are different.
I believe he is saying he is impressed that the Amiga actually did it..
All I'm saying is that preemptive multitasking isn't impressive from the computer hardware's point of view, because just about anything can do it properly ;)
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Do you ever power it up to see if it still works :)
Not lately. I do remember that the internal floppy was dead. I used a HD and external floppy to run it. I found a second 1000 at the Goodwill for 7 bucks with the intent to salvage the drive... but when I tried that one out, and it worked, I couldn't bring myself to gut it.
My 2000 is also retired.... but it lives on as an HD image for UAE.
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The Amiga 1000 looks nice. Don't forget you have to load the OS first, no rom.
Also upgrades are minimal.
Personally I would be depressed if I had one, I would just think about what direction the Amiga could have gone in.
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The A1000 was stylish enough, I had one or two but didn't find much use for them since I already owned much more usable Amigas. I guess it would've been different back in 1985.
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I find it quite cool that Amiga in 1985 could multitask, with as low as 250 kb ram, not even Windows 3.1 could multitask, you could only use one program at the time. The Amiga was ahead of its time in 1985, and some years to come :-) I only wish i had an Amiga 1000 :-) it looks like a nice machine. Are any of you lucky enough to own an Amiga 1000?
It was impressive but I have to admit it was impossible to run Deluxe Paint and Kindwords same time even with 1024 kB RAM.
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It was impressive but I have to admit it was impossible to run Deluxe Paint and Kindwords same time even with 1024 kB RAM.
it was not because of the OS but because of these programs. Kamelito
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The Amiga 1000 looks nice. Don't forget you have to load the OS first, no rom.
You had to load Kickstart, but it did have a ROM, or they'dve had to include a front panel for you to toggle the loader in with ;P
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... not even Windows 3.1 could multitask, you could only use one program at the time.
To be precise, Windows 3.x did multitask, at least on a 386 - however, only on the much more primitive, cooperative level (which the application needed to allow and some just didn't). Amiga OS offered preemptive multitasking from the beginning - a feature which required 10 years to reach the mainstream Windows platform (Windows 95).
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To be precise, Windows 3.x did multitask, at least on a 386 - however, only on the much more primitive, cooperative level (which the application needed to allow and some just didn't). Amiga OS offered preemptive multitasking from the beginning - a feature which required 10 years to reach the mainstream Windows platform (Windows 95).
It would preemptively multitask DOS applications, just not windows applications until Windows 95. Even within Windows95 I believe all applications shared a common message queue, which was a point of failure for smooth multitasking.
Anyway, there is nothing really magical about preemptive multitasking in just 256K of ram(or less), and if you had a A1000 with just 256K of ram, you probably were not doing much multitasking anyway...
The preemptive multitasking was just one of the many cool features. The GUI, and API and custom hardware were equally important.
Cinemaware games were a good example of what could be achieved in the OS (with the hardware) without banging on the hardware directly...
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To be precise, Windows 3.x did multitask, at least on a 386 - however, only on the much more primitive, cooperative level (which the application needed to allow and some just didn't). Amiga OS offered preemptive multitasking from the beginning - a feature which required 10 years to reach the mainstream Windows platform (Windows 95).
It did on the 286 as well.
I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience. It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.
Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.
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It did on the 286 as well.
I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience. It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.
Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.
Well, about stability you mix OS and applications, no memory protection forced serious Amiga programmers to write more robust programs, if you run a bad one the OS won't help you there. Kamelito
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I've had more crashes (program and system) on Windows 3.1 than I've ever had on AmigaOS...
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Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.
Did your Amiga also have 8MB of ram? Windows also had virtual memory....
I think the biggest problem with stability on the Amiga was caused by running out of RAM.
I ended up getting into x86 because you could afford 40mhz and 8MB of ram for a fraction of the price of a comparable Amiga system... not because I liked DOS or Windows :)
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It did on the 286 as well.
Not pre-emptively, and very few people actually ran Windows on a 286. ;-)
I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience.
It did compared to the other OSs out at the time. IMHO
It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.
I used a lot of early Windows (predating Windows 3 even) and early MacOS.
There were lots of crashes there too...
Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.
Windows 3.x was an acceptable program launcher, but as with most things, the stability was dependent on the software you were running. It could be just as unstable or more so than any of the other machines out there..
The Mac was the most stable (well, once they got to System 6), but I remember lots of "Sad Macs."
The more you used them, the more they crashed...
In theory, Windows 3.1 was more stable because it didn't have pre-emptive multitasking. But I found that my Amiga could be very stable when I ran known stable software and Windows could be very unstable, as the term "cooperative multitasking" implies that the programs cooperate, which they didn't always do...
That said, I've had any and all OSes be both stable and not stable for me depending on what I was doing...
However, pre-emptive multitasking was incredibly useful for me at the time.
It was well worth the occasional crash. ;-)
desiv
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It certainly was more stable.
Sorry, given the wide range of hardware, drivers, and software developers, Windows was probably the least stable compared to Mac or Amiga. The flexibility and expanse of hardware was at the cost of stability due to poor drivers, conflicting hardware and an OS that did not separate such things yet.
It was not until Windows XP that MS brought the stability of NT which the driver availability of 9x.
*I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated.
No offense, this is probably because you have no idea how it really works, how hard it would be to code something like this given the specs at the time, and have no idea how bad the other systems were during that period of time. Remember, by 1985 Andy Hertzfeld was just beginning to shoehorn Switcher into 512k Macs (which would lead to MultiFinder).
The biggest advantage the Amiga had was multitasking was built into the OS...it was part of the framework foundation. Most of the multitasking that came after the Amiga was an afterthought so it was never part of the foundation. It became a layer that the OS and Applications had to pass through.
This is one of the reasons memory fragmentation could really cause 'multitasking' to have problems on say Switcher, MultiFinder, or even early Windows. The Amiga was created with multitasking so memory fragmentation was not a huge problem.
As an adult, programmer, and CS Professor, I would love to sit down with Carl and ask him many questions about his designs. Knowing what I know now, he was a bigger genius than most people realize given what he had to work with.
-P
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Let's not forget about Quarterdeck Desqview and Desqview/X. It ran on a 386 with 640kb of RAM and if you had extra memory, it could be mapped by QEMM and made usable by Desqview.
1985 was an interesting year because Desqview was released in July, AmigaOS was released in October, and Windows followed shortly after in November.
Desqview was actually the first multi-tasking OS I used and shortly after that I purchased my Amiga 1000.
It was amazing what programmers were able to do with such little resources back then.
These days, I think most programmers take for granted the abundance of resources available (GB's of RAM, TB's of HD, etc, etc). I think it makes for lazy programming and a constant bloat of our OS's and applications.
That's why I like to look back and use some of these great machines of those times; it reminds you of what can be done within confined specs.
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Let's not forget about Quarterdeck Desqview and Desqview/X. It ran on a 386 with 640kb of RAM and if you had extra memory, it could be mapped by QEMM and made usable by Desqview.
1985 was an interesting year because Desqview was released in July, AmigaOS was released in October, and Windows followed shortly after in November.
Desqview was actually the first multi-tasking OS I used and shortly after that I purchased my Amiga 1000.
It was amazing what programmers were able to do with such little resources back then.
These days, I think most programmers take for granted the abundance of resources available (GB's of RAM, TB's of HD, etc, etc). I think it makes for lazy programming and a constant bloat of our OS's and applications.
That's why I like to look back and use some of these great machines of those times; it reminds you of what can be done within confined specs.
Yes it was amazing what they could do back then with so little. I come to think of my first computer a Commodore 64 :) with only 64 kb of ram, i know it was not the same as Amiga, but still it could do wonderful things in the hands of the right people. The pc i am using now has 60000 times more ram than a Commodore 64
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As far as multitasking... I don't think there is any comparison of amiga os and other available systems at the time.
I ran a bbs on pc... I wanted to do it on amiga os but couldn't afford an amiga 2000 at the time. I always had an amiga for me, and pc for the bbs, running
dos and desqview.
I ran a bbs and did alot of bbsing. On a 386 with desqview you could call a bbs and do something else at one time, but it crashed constantly and was not a joy to use. I could run my 1 node bbs and run perhaps some small apps in the background (the draw or a text editor) But the users noticed lags while I did this.
At the time time, I could use an amiga 500 with 2 meg ram and call a bbs and download files while playing a game, while playing mod files, while running dpaint in another screen, while waiting for the files to download, with almost never a crash...
Later, I got a 486. I tried running 4 phone lines (nodes on the bbs) on one machine, no way. I could do 2 lines max at 2400 baud on a 486 66dx2 with 32 megs ram.
Around the same time, a friend of mine ran 8 lines (6 - 2400 baud lines and 2 57600 lines) on an amiga 2000 with 25mhz 68030, with cnet. He could also
still play games, write letters, play mod files, play games, view gifs,and users rarely or never saw any lag.
Around that sime time.
Want to try windows for multitasking? Forget it, it was much slower and worse than desqview because the processor did everything, graphics, sound, all bogged down the main cpu.
Amiga worked better because the sound, graphics used custom
chips... and the os cooperated, spreading the workload across graphics
chips, sound chips and main cpu.
windows 95 things got a bit better, but not much. I still think an amiga 500
with 68000 and 2 meg of ram ran rings around a 200 mhz Pentium running windows 95 or 98 when it came to running multiple applications and a smooth user experience.
After windows 98, I gave up on dos/windows and moved to linux. Linux multitasks as smoothly as amiga. I sure miss the simplicity of knowing where
everything is in amiga though...
I should also mention, before amiga or pc I used a trs-80 color computer with os9, it multitasked beautifully on a 2mhz 6809 in 64k. Coming from that,
I couldn't believe the ****tiness of a "pc" with so much more resources not being able to do this effectively. How can a computer that is like 25 times
faster than the 2mhz color computer not be able to run 2 applications smoothly multitasking? Bad design, and bad programming I think.
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I ran a 386sx25 with OS/2 (2.1 then Warp 3.0) and it was great, didnt start using windows until WinNT 4.0 was released.
OS/2 had stuff that Winblows still doesnt such as a fully object oriented OS - you could use both floppies at the same time and I can remember having Lotus Smartsuite for OS/2 installing from one drive and MS Office for Windows installing on the other drive at the same time while surfing a BBS!
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>I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated.
It can not be.
But a lot of people had too limited setup to truly use it.
>Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience.
Yes it did. After you found stable programs, you could multitask a workd day without any symptoms of problems.
I got A2000C(1MchipRAM)+2MB+20MBHDD+Bridgeboard+Multisync in 1989, it was a superb workstation untill 1994 (I sold it at that time). I used multitasking continuously. I even tried to favour games with HDD installation + multitasking option. Did some renderings in multitasking, dock writing & picture editing for the doc...
And I had mods playing on the background, without any hickups. One nice thing was be able to use music apps and animation tools at the same time and record the animation with sound to VHS.
>Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board,
My first own real x86 was P1/75Mhz with some 8MB RAM etc (in 1995).
It could in no way compare with my A4k.
(x86 had more raw power but it was slower than 040/25 systemn anyway, everywhere. And unstable. Cheaper, though.)
(before late 1995 I used bridgeboard with my A2000 and PC Task on my 4k for occasional x86 need, for graduation work I had P1/60+Win3.11 at work, but I bought my own HW to get rid some of the troubles.)
>I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.
My experience is totally different.
On Amiga you can set up the system to be stable. You cound stretch the system unbelieveably.
But pre-NT windows systems always broke if you truly used them a lot (for more than word2).
(and you had to do insane amount of tricks to get every SW + games to work. For example I had 32bit soundcard on the P1/75, but never got it working with DOS games (90% of x86 game content was in DOS). And usually you had to kill win95 to run DOS games ... and even then you had to have the know how to set high/low/whatever mem and IRQs right .... AAAAARGHHHHH!!!!!).
For me. The biggest advancement on my devices after AOS1.2 in multitasking was the Executive task scheduler.
Suddenly I could automate the priority settings. 600%cpu load without loosing any responsiveness...
And also Amigas virtual memory was superb. I was able to set what apps use virtual memory, the rest of the system remained 99% responsive even when there was a lot of swapping ongoing. .... oh those times ....
Yes, most of my HW have MP etc etc. But still the multitasking is behind Amiga basics. (to my liking)
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One nice multitasking thing on AOS has been that you can continue your doings without any multitasking quirks even when handling the main media, floppy disks. You could do disk to disk copies and backups while continuing yoruy work and music listening.
Later it was the same with CD-R. You could write CD and multitask without as big risk of failing burn as on Win95 (when using modest HW). I think minimum recommended CPU for CDR burning was some 200Mhz CPU on x86??? On A2000 some people did it with 030/25Mhz or less, in multitasking. (when burnproof HW became available, things got forgotten)
And for multitasking....
For some reason, even when DMA was not used, Amigas could do faster HDD data transfers and with lower CPU overhead than on x86. It affected in multitasking greatly in late 90's.
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One impressive example I saw was of a "high seas sailor" acquaintance I knew, who ran an A4000 with a warp engine+scsi and picasso 4 with a Magellan set up: web, IRC, burning playstation , ahem "back-ups" ( 4 burners going), running x-copy with 4 floppy drives, downloading files continuosly, playing mods in the background, and he was bringing up listers, creating folders of software "packages" that we wanted, and he ran a BBS at the same time. Windows 98 had just come out, but next to this Amiga, it was a toy.
And for all the "no memory protection" arguments, here was an amiga that had up time in the months, doing all sorts of crap, but this was in the hands of a guy who really knew how to set it up right.
I would then go home to my 2mb A1200 and cry myself to sleep....
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One impressive example I saw was of a "high seas sailor" acquaintance I knew, who ran an A4000 with a warp engine+scsi and picasso 4 with a Magellan set up: web, IRC, burning playstation , ahem "back-ups" ( 4 burners going), running x-copy with 4 floppy drives, downloading files continuosly, playing mods in the background, and he was bringing up listers, creating folders of software "packages" that we wanted, and he ran a BBS at the same time. Windows 98 had just come out, but next to this Amiga, it was a toy.
And for all the "no memory protection" arguments, here was an amiga that had up time in the months, doing all sorts of crap, but this was in the hands of a guy who really knew how to set it up right.
I would then go home to my 2mb A1200 and cry myself to sleep....
Hi that sounds very cool than An Amiga 4000 could do all that. He must realy has know how to get the most of that girl :)
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One impressive example I saw was of a "high seas sailor" acquaintance I knew, who ran an A4000 with a warp engine+scsi and picasso 4 with a Magellan set up: web, IRC, burning playstation , ahem "back-ups" ( 4 burners going), running x-copy with 4 floppy drives, downloading files continuosly, playing mods in the background, and he was bringing up listers, creating folders of software "packages" that we wanted, and he ran a BBS at the same time. Windows 98 had just come out, but next to this Amiga, it was a toy.
And for all the "no memory protection" arguments, here was an amiga that had up time in the months, doing all sorts of crap, but this was in the hands of a guy who really knew how to set it up right.
I would then go home to my 2mb A1200 and cry myself to sleep....
Hi that sounds very cool than An Amiga 4000 could do all that. He must realy has know how to get the most out of that girl :)
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The Amiga 1000 looks nice. Don't forget you have to load the OS first, no rom.
Also upgrades are minimal.
The ROM thing was easily handled with 3rd party upgrade boards. I had a DKB Kwikstart in my 1000.
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"Can do" and "actually did" are different.
I believe he is saying he is impressed that the Amiga actually did it..
There were multitasking implementations for the C64 :)
It's actually very easy to do on the C64 simply by setting up a suitable interrupt, since you have so little state to save/load, and then just swap the return addresses around before you leave the interrupt handler.
Of course, it's not very *useful* on a machine that slow - the closest most people would get would be the interrupt handler in parallel with a main "thread".
But at least one BASIC extension offered pre-emptively multi-tasking BASIC. Lightning BASIC perhaps? I believe it was up 3 BASIC "threads" in parallel + sprite animations.
(EDIT: It was Laser Basic from OASIS I remember, based on "White Lightning" which had a boat-load of other features too - there a demo of some of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8609Pel_RU )
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I ran a 386sx25 with OS/2 (2.1 then Warp 3.0) and it was great, didnt start using windows until WinNT 4.0 was released.
I did like OS/2, but they were behind the curve initially.
It didn't even release until 87, and that was with no GUI.
The initial GUI was released in 88, and it took it quite a bit to get to "user friendly" status.
By that time tho, Windows (which wasn't as good kernel wise) had the market all sewn up..
Heck, it didn't get all 32-bit goodness until 2.0 which was released in 92.
OS/2 Warp was awesome tho... A great OS.. ;-)
And released a year before Win95. Too bad they couldn't have marketed it better.
There are also people that say that the Windows 3.1 application compatibility helped kill it. Developers saw no reason to write a native OS/2 version of their app if it would run (mostly) already.
Then again, by 1994, WB 3.x had been out for 2 years. And from a user perspective (not memory protection or kernels), I preferred WB3.x to OS/2 WARP, which came out 2 years later.
desiv
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There were multitasking implementations for the C64 :)
True, and fun stuff..
But we were talking Multitasking OSes here.. ;-)
desiv
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@desiv
You might be interested to know OS/2 lives.
http://www.ecomstation.com (http://www.ecomstation.com)
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You might be interested to know OS/2 lives.
http://www.ecomstation.com
Oh sweet !!!
Awesome!!!
Thanx!
desiv
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There is a difference between multi-threading and multi-tasking.
The C64 was my first computer and as much as I can remember, there was no way to task switch and have more than 1 open application and switch between them.
The C64 was an amazing piece of hardware for it's time, but, I think Commodore really set the bar when they created The Amiga.
There were multitasking implementations for the C64 :)
It's actually very easy to do on the C64 simply by setting up a suitable interrupt, since you have so little state to save/load, and then just swap the return addresses around before you leave the interrupt handler.
Of course, it's not very *useful* on a machine that slow - the closest most people would get would be the interrupt handler in parallel with a main "thread".
But at least one BASIC extension offered pre-emptively multi-tasking BASIC. Lightning BASIC perhaps? I believe it was up 3 BASIC "threads" in parallel + sprite animations.
(EDIT: It was Laser Basic from OASIS I remember, based on "White Lightning" which had a boat-load of other features too - there a demo of some of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8609Pel_RU )
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Holy heck... OS/2 lives?? I thought that was long gone.
I'd bet there is a linux kernel running under eComStation.. lol..
@desiv
You might be interested to know OS/2 lives.
http://www.ecomstation.com
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The C64 was my first computer and as much as I can remember, there was no way to task switch and have more than 1 open application and switch between them.
That's because the OS doesn't have preemptive multitasking, not because the C64 can't do it (it's easy to do, actually).
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I know. :)
The thread was about: what was reality, not what was possible.
That's because the OS doesn't have preemptive multitasking, not because the C64 can't do it (it's easy to do, actually).
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Amiga worked better because the sound, graphics used custom
chips... and the os cooperated, spreading the workload across graphics
chips, sound chips and main cpu.
I don't know how many people remember this but Apple tried to include custom chips to offload the CPU on the MacIIFX and then with DSP chips down the road.
The problem was that it was all 'add-on' technology and the core OS was not built to do this. Almost no software took advantage of the MacIIFX's custom chips and very few used the DSP's later (other than for specific tasks - audio related).
Folks like Guy Kawasaki and other Apple evangelists used to promote Mono-tasking as a more preferred way to compute.
Anybody remember these Apple Phrases?
"I can't multitasking so why should my computer?"
"I'm more productive staying on task with one application."
"A human being isn't meant to multitask."
"Multitasking is a distraction."
Apple really pushed the whole mono-tasking view of computing.
Good times,
-P
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Folks like Guy Kawasaki and other Apple evangelists used to promote Mono-tasking as a more preferred way to compute.
Anybody remember these Apple Phrases?
"I can't multitasking so why should my computer?"
"I'm more productive staying on task with one application."
"A human being isn't meant to multitask."
"Multitasking is a distraction."
Apple really pushed the whole mono-tasking view of computing.
Good times,
-P
Brilliant grounds for an Apple piss take! I like it. :laugh1:
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it was not because of the OS but because of these programs. Kamelito
If it had virtual memory you could actually run paint program and word processor at the same time. So it is actually an OS limitation.
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If it had virtual memory you could actually run paint program and word processor at the same time. So it is actually an OS limitation.
I'm trying to imagine a virtual-memory system on 8MHz and 28 KB/s floppy disks, but I can't think over the screaming in my brain. I think there may be a lesson in there somewhere.
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Well, about stability you mix OS and applications, no memory protection forced serious Amiga programmers to write more robust programs, if you run a bad one the OS won't help you there. Kamelito
Neither did Windows 3.x. There Windows applications were running inside a single process and applications could share memory like Amiga does. What made it finally quite unstable piece of crap was trying to retrofit paging and virtual memory to this mess. Applications had to lock handles to convert them to real memory pointers but sometimes programmers were not careful. Sometimes they were using stale pointer that worked until memory paging kicked in.
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I'm trying to imagine a virtual-memory system on 8MHz and 28 KB/s floppy disks, but I can't think over the screaming in my brain. I think there may be a lesson in there somewhere.
Indeed. For proper multitasking you needed more memory and fast hard disks...
I remember when I was coding some application on my Amiga 500. It had 1MB RAM only and when asm source code was over 150 kB it was no longer possible compile it while keeping my editor running on a background. So I had to save my code to a floppy and close editor to run compiler. Only to find out I had made small typo and had to edit code again. Back then I didnt have an access to memory conservative compilers and had to use A68k and Blink. Those were times...
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Indeed. For proper multitasking you needed more memory and fast hard disks...
Alternatively, you could just have efficient software that maximizes free memory for your actual work purposes and enough RAM to fit the task at hand, rather than churning data to and fro over a disk interface many orders of magnitude slower than the RAM which is itself likely not actually fast enough to keep up with the demands of the processor.
But, you know, that'd just be crazy.
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Alternatively, you could just have efficient software that maximizes free memory for your actual work purposes and enough RAM to fit the task at hand, rather than churning data to and fro over a disk interface many orders of magnitude slower than the RAM which is itself likely not actually fast enough to keep up with the demands of the processor.
But, you know, that'd just be crazy.
C64 coders were totally crazy. They had only 64 kB and had to use all imaginable tricks to save few hundred bytes. But still, no matter how efficiently it is done, there is always upper limit...
But actually on Amiga the limit was in chip ram. Deluxe Paint was designed to use chip ram sparingly but code size was not important when it wasnt going to chip ram. It wasnt always important to optimize code for size and not even your data.
Obviously chip ram limitation crippled Amiga multitasking at some point. Even when there was enough (fast) ram there wasnt enough chip ram to store gfx and sound. Nothing is perfect, not even on Amiga :-)
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True enough - no existing system is an ideal system. Still, I'd place more stock in good coding than hacky disk-swapping any day.
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I did like OS/2, but they were behind the curve
OS/2 Warp was awesome tho... A great OS.. ;-)
And released a year before Win95. Too bad they couldn't have marketed it better.
Agreed, OS/2 Warp was amazing and win95 sucked balls but by that time microsoft had a death grip on the OEM's and they wouldn't ship pc's without an MS OS.
There are also people that say that the Windows 3.1 application compatibility helped kill it. Developers saw no reason to write a native OS/2 version of their app if it would run (mostly) already.
Yeah that prolly didnt help either.
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I know. :)
The thread was about: what was reality, not what was possible.
And the reality was that there were environments for the C64 that allowed you to multi-task. Shipping. As commercial products (I owned a copy of the aforementioned Laser BASIC for example). Just not built into ROM. Of course there were multi-tasking on lots of larger systems long before the Amiga as well.
The point is not to diminish the accomplishment of the Amiga, just that what was impressive about the Amiga was not multi-tasking per se, but an OS that actually combined multiple features in a way that made multi-tasking not just practical, but useful.
E.g. without windowing and abstracted device access and enough memory and CPU, multi-tasking on more primitive machines or OS's was a novelty, and the machines and OS's that could do preemptive multi-tasking as well or better than the Amiga at the time were not targeting consumers.
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Indeed. For proper multitasking you needed more memory and fast hard disks...
I remember when I was coding some application on my Amiga 500. It had 1MB RAM only and when asm source code was over 150 kB it was no longer possible compile it while keeping my editor running on a background.
FrexxEd (which I'm in theory working - at significantly slower than snails pace - on upgrading; I've actually committed stuff to the repository this year, honest) actually has an ingenious way to conserve RAM there - something you'd only see on a machine like the Amiga, largely because it itsn't worth the hassle any more in the day of multi-GB RAM machines:
Export the buffers as a filesystem handler.
You can mount FrexxEd: and dir it to list the files that are currently open in the editor, and run whatever applications you want on them without wasting memory on additional buffers.
It's elegant in a way, but people without experience with a machine like the Amiga takes one look at it and goes "wha?!?!? Why don't you just save it to a temporary file". Then I have to explain how that might have meant having to switch floppies and stuff :D
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os9 could do very effective multitasking in 64k on a color computer 2. This is a very primitive example but still....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhQGknYPl1Y
When color computer 3 came with 512k, this 8 bit with os9 kicked the ass of any pc. I could be on any ansi bbs while playing a 128 color game on a seperate full screen page, download files on my 20 meg mfm hard drive, while text editing or writing basic programs. In short, the computer didn't make you wait.
At one time, I had two phone lines connected to my coco and could call 2 bbs systems at 2400 baud in seperate os9 "windows".
It was primitive but beautiful. Get used to being able to do that and you can't stand a single tasking system, which is why I went to amiga next.
It was the only system that would let me work like I was used to. I considered amiga os to be a vast improvement to what I was used to. I would render graphics while calling bbs systems or downloading files. I always had a few screens going, and it was beautiful.
Today, people with 10 tons of resources are spoiled. One of my neighbors just bought a 6 core machine, simply because he has he likes to have the best and it was the most expensive computer at the place he went. I asked him what he's going to do with it? He said "Check my emails, facebook, and surf the internet. There is 5/6th of computing power wasted on that guy.
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Remember, UNIX was originally developed on a DEC PDP-7 to multiuser+multitask in 1969; The PDP series (oddly they were 18-bit'ers) had had a very similar instruction set with the MOS 6502
As a side note: Compute! Magazine published a simple multitasking piece of code that used the NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt) vector to do it on a C64; one of my early efforts changed the Basic start/end vectors to but Basic in that top 4K meant for ml programs leaving the 32K below it as free ram. It was for a BBS Terminal program that put downloads in the large buffer away from the code..
Did anybody remember the Mac OS's early version of a task switcher that went from task to task by clicking a button?
Sorry about this post, my ADD is showing
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he likes to have the best and it was the most expensive computer at the place he went. I asked him what he's going to do with it? He said "Check my emails, facebook, and surf the internet..
Damn! If x1000 would have been available on that shop... ;-)
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@itix "For proper multitasking you needed more memory and fast hard disks..."
On my A2k that had 1M chip and 2M FAST +200kB/sec hard drive the experience was already insanely nice.
A friend of mine got A590 + RAM for his A500 and also it was superb (up to 2.5MB sec disk transfers and DMA IIRC, better I/O speed than later on my A4k).
btw. Did ImageFX internal virtual memory require MMU? I think not.
VMEM and and Gigamem required MMU.
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Remember, UNIX was originally developed on a DEC PDP-7 to multiuser+multitask in 1969; The PDP series (oddly they were 18-bit'ers) had had a very similar instruction set with the MOS 6502
Actually they were all over the place, with (off the top of my head) 12, 16, and 18-bit offerings of quite varied designs. (18-bit actually wasn't odd at the time, quite the opposite in fact; I'm not sure exactly where it comes from, but I expect that for scientific purposes having an integer range that encompassed all the way from +99,999 to -99,999 with room to spare made it easy to think of "five-digit integer capability" or somesuch.)
The PDP-11 was actually a big influence on the design of the 68000; you can thank it for the Amiga having a decent complement of truly general-purpose registers instead of the 8086's frol-de-rol with A, B, C, and D all being able to do different overlapping but never identical sets of things...
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Prior to the Amiga (later renamed Amiga 1000 to distinguish with those ugly 500/2000 replacements coming) the only multi-tasking OS on a home/personal computer was with the Sinclair QL. This however is not a GUI based multi-tasking OS.
So yes it was the first, and if you ever used a 1mb Atari ST over a 1mb Amiga 1000 you will instantly appreciate the option of multi-tasking.
Secondly not only was it the more sophisticated pre-emptive type (using a round robin timeslice scheduler?) but it was also quite capable of load balancing and prioritising well and it was mighty efficient due to the Kernal.
So in summary, before Windows XP in 2002 or OS/2 2.0 onwards maybe half a decade before that....multitasking on everything else was a load of pizz poor marketing bullcrap.
For nearly a decade and a half it seriously was a case of 'only Amiga'
Now if you are stupid enough to put down the mutli-tasking kernal of Amiga because it doesn't magically fit interlaced HAM animations and complex word processor documents into 256kb well go and use a Win 95/98 PC where not only does the same thing not fit but their Kernal takes up much more memory AND it loses memory like a rusty sieve and needs constant daily reboots a decade after Kickstart/Workbench 1.2 to get the same program you just shut down to run again or print something etc etc!
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I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.
I couldn't disagree more, even "Mr Windows" Paul Thurott was an Amiga guy back then and admitted once on Windows Weekly podcast that the first time he used Windows 3.1 he thought it "was a joke, how can people seriously use this" (to paraphrase).
Workbench 3.x was light-years ahead of Windows 3.x, it really wasn't until 95 that it even felt remotely comparable.
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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.
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Alternatively, you could just have efficient software that maximizes free memory for your actual work purposes and enough RAM to fit the task at hand, rather than churning data to and fro over a disk interface many orders of magnitude slower than the RAM which is itself likely not actually fast enough to keep up with the demands of the processor.
But, you know, that'd just be crazy.
Some software needs alot of ram because of the functionality it offers. The only compromise you can make here is to remove functionality, but then there would be no innovation.
Some uses more than it should because writing perfectly efficient software is alot more expensive & ram is cheap. The only compromise you can make here is delay the software and charge more for it, the odds are the developers would run out of money.
It's not limited to Windows, the Amiga & Mac had the same issues. They both had to increase ram during development, because their inefficient code was too bloated. Using high level languages to ease software development was the cause.
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Some software needs alot of ram because ....
And that again brought something to my mind.
After we got enough RAM (16MB on classic, 512MB on bigger boxes) and especially nowdays I think SW code should never be swapped to disk. Multitasking is more smooth when only heavy data is swapped (the way how one could do it on 68k with ImageFX etc).
It's a shame that for many apps in the mainstream developers spend absolutely no time in optimizing and the end user pays the bill.
(a few days ago I spent two hours waiting for NI DAQ SW to install on a high spec workstation and that kind of driver monsters make any computer to crawl (when silly OS is used). I imagine it would take a few days to re-install everything, so we keep HDD images in safe place in case of HDD hazards.)
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.... and especially nowdays I think SW code should never be swapped to disk.
Oh, don't go there..
The "swap or not swap" arguments in the Linux kernel threads are epic...
;-)
desiv
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Some software needs alot of ram because of the functionality it offers. The only compromise you can make here is to remove functionality, but then there would be no innovation.
Sometimes this is true, yes - but very rarely compared to the number of applications that just plain take way more than they need.
Some uses more than it should because writing perfectly efficient software is alot more expensive & ram is cheap. The only compromise you can make here is delay the software and charge more for it, the odds are the developers would run out of money.
Writing perfectly efficient software is one thing, but these days most developers don't even try. There are text editors now that take up 10-20MB just sitting idle with nothing open. That's inexcusable. It's not even that nobody hand-optimizes software anymore, hardly anybody even designs for efficiency on any level these days.
Also RAM is only cheap by comparison to how it used to be. Any money you have to spend upgrading a computer that would otherwise suit your needs perfectly well because bloaty software is thrashing the disk is not "cheap" by any measure.
Oh, don't go there..
The "swap or not swap" arguments in the Linux kernel threads are epic...
This absolutely baffles me...sometimes you do have no choice but to rely on disk swapping, but it is so monumentally inefficient that I can't even begin to fathom why you would not avoid it whenever possible...
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It would preemptively multitask DOS applications.
No, it wasn`t. There was some primitive form of virtual process thing, but multitasking is a different kind of beast.
Anyway, there is nothing really magical about preemptive multitasking [..] if you had a A1000 with just 256K of ram, you probably were not doing much multitasking anyway...
Open Notepad, open Amiga Basic, run the Bach-Tune-Demo and write a note while it is still playing. Try this under DOS.
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There are text editors now that take up 10-20MB just sitting idle with nothing open.
Only 20 MB? Must be efficient program. I just launched Word and it is taking over 40 MB right after launch. I am not sure if there is anything what good old Kindwords couldnt do? :-)
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Only 20 MB? Must be efficient program. I just launched Word and it is taking over 40 MB right after launch. I am not sure if there is anything what good old Kindwords couldnt do? :-)
Well, "text editor" is not the same thing as a full-fledged formatted word processor, but I won't argue that the point is just as applicable to your examples ;)
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There are text editors now that take up 10-20MB just sitting idle with nothing open. That's inexcusable. It's not even that nobody hand-optimizes software anymore, hardly anybody even designs for efficiency on any level these days.
You think it's inexcusable, but you have a rather extreme point of view.
If you work in software development and aren't lucky enough to work for a billionaire that is as obsessed with efficiency as you are then you'll end up having to make tough choices.
After you follow these choices here:
[URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle)[/COLOR][/URL]
"You are given the options of Fast, Good and Cheap, and told to pick any two. Here Fast refers to the time required to deliver the product, Good is the quality of the final product, and Cheap refers to the total cost of designing and building the product. This triangle reflects the fact that the three properties of a project are interrelated, and it is not possible to optimize all three – one will always suffer. In other words you have three options:
- Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
- Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
- Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time."
Which compromise would you make?
If you pick throwing money at it, then there is no guarantee that your product will ever recoup the money. Plus you run into Brook's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law).
So you could decide to take longer but then as your project rolls on not making money, ram is actually getting cheaper & cheaper all the time. You're going to have to charge more and users will ask you to justify it. The software runs in 100mb you'll say, they will answer: but my phone has 100gb of ram in it & I've been running your competitors cheaper software that uses 1gb of ram for the last year.
Good is something you'll have to compromise on. Unfortuntaly design decisions made at the start of the project are often unfixable by the end. This is usually worse on software you've tried to optimise, object oriented code is often easier to change but it comes with a higher performance penalty to start with. I've worked on a project that moved from C to C++ and while some things got slower there was also alot of things that became faster.
Some people go the open source route as without a boss you can spend as much time as you like writing the software. But this is only a short term fix. It will only work while there are people that grew up with being obsessed about efficiency spending their free time to write the software. They need a job to pay the bills & open source software doesn't generate money for software developers. The only money is in web sites and scripting, which isn't the type of job that an optimisation junky will go for.
Either use what makes you happy or become happy about what you use, or you'll end up making yourself ill.
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You think it's inexcusable, but you have a rather extreme point of view.
If you work in software development and aren't lucky enough to work for a billionaire that is as obsessed with efficiency as you are then you'll end up having to make tough choices.
I do work in software development, and I do it backend, on processes only the IT staff will ever use once per day, for a company that pays me the same in any case and only cares whether things are up and running on-time. Even so, I at least put some kind of thought into making things reasonably efficient and not a huge waste of memory and CPU time. Someone designing software that many people will use multiple hours a day should be putting even more thought into designing software that's light and responsive and not bloaty crap, not less (and that goes for the companies behind them, too.)
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I do work in software development, and I do it backend, on processes only the IT staff will ever use once per day, for a company that pays me the same in any case and only cares whether things are up and running on-time. Even so, I at least put some kind of thought into making things reasonably efficient and not a huge waste of memory and CPU time. Someone designing software that many people will use multiple hours a day should be putting even more thought into designing software that's light and responsive and not bloaty crap, not less (and that goes for the companies behind them, too.)
Unfortunately the companies won't agree with you, the same as they don't agree with the people who work there that want more time to write better software.
There are programmers that are incapable of writing good software, but it's quite subjective so you can't sack someone because of it. Most managers in software development are clueless, they just see people standing at a production line churning out product and paying into the managers pension.
Basically decent software is doomed to fail all the time any humans are involved in some form in it's creation.
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Well, that's basically the problem, isn't it? Software companies (or, actually, pretty much all companies, these days) have zero interest in actually providing quality anymore except insofar as it can be used to justify a higher price tag, because the whole pirahna-pool atmosphere of the modern business world sneers at the idea of pride in a job well done, let alone any other reason for doing anything than making the most money with the least expenditure of effort possible. It's a disease...
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Well, that's basically the problem, isn't it? Software companies (or, actually, pretty much all companies, these days) have zero interest in actually providing quality anymore except insofar as it can be used to justify a higher price tag, because the whole pirahna-pool atmosphere of the modern business world sneers at the idea of pride in a job well done, let alone any other reason for doing anything than making the most money with the least expenditure of effort possible. It's a disease...
Very well said. Greed is what drives these 'people'. Especially the greedy trash at the top. These 'people' need to be kicked down into the gutter where they belong (time for another French revolution).
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Well, that's basically the problem, isn't it? Software companies (or, actually, pretty much all companies, these days) have zero interest in actually providing quality anymore except insofar as it can be used to justify a higher price tag, because the whole pirahna-pool atmosphere of the modern business world sneers at the idea of pride in a job well done, let alone any other reason for doing anything than making the most money with the least expenditure of effort possible. It's a disease...
It's always been like that, we were just delusional sheep in the past.
You describe Commodore extremely well.
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The result that will make the person responsible for green-lighting it look as good as possible, and permit blame to be shifted to someone else, if it tanks, is the result that will be pursued.
If it actually works as intended, that's a convenient side-effect.
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All I'm saying is that preemptive multitasking isn't impressive from the computer hardware's point of view, because just about anything can do it properly ;)
That last word invalidates your statement.
Properly would mean efficiently and with a measure of utility and many early microprocessor can not provide that.
The 6809, yes. The 68K, yes. Early Intel processors? Not well at all.
Minix was probably the only example of this that worked reasonably well (until the '386).
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There's nothing about the x86 architecture that prevents it from doing decent multitasking, even in the larval 16-bit phases. It's just that nobody did it well until way later, for stupid reasons.
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I think what was impressive is that it was one of the first OS for "family computers" to have such an OS. Most other mainstream OS of the time (DOS/CP&M/TOS/MacOS) only had single task or simple cooperative multitasking. But Unix was already there, and way more sophisticated than AmigaOS, that wasn't what it was supposed to be anyway. Commodore wanted it out too fast. And that's maybe the most impressive: the timeframe used to release a fully GUI-OS...
But by the mid/end of the nineties it already showed its age: no RTG/RTA (yes: Windows 3.11 was more advanced in that regard), no memory protection, no virtual memory, not portable,... And despite mostly a rewrite (OS4/MOS/AROS), this hasn't changed. There is RTG/RTA, but that's it. Most big technical limitations are there...
We all agree it was impressive 27 years ago. But time has changed. Windows isn't based on DOS anymore. MacOS has now its roots in Unix/BSD. And AmigaOS is now the most limited.
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AmigaOS 4 requires about 40-60mb to run. This is inexcusable: amigaos 1.x would run with 256kb (aie.: 0,25 mb)
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As far as multitasking... I don't think there is any comparison of amiga os and other available systems at the time.
I ran a bbs on pc... I wanted to do it on amiga os but couldn't afford an amiga 2000 at the time. I always had an amiga for me, and pc for the bbs, running
dos and desqview.
I ran a bbs and did alot of bbsing. On a 386 with desqview you could call a bbs and do something else at one time, but it crashed constantly and was not a joy to use. I could run my 1 node bbs and run perhaps some small apps in the background (the draw or a text editor) But the users noticed lags while I did this.
At the time time, I could use an amiga 500 with 2 meg ram and call a bbs and download files while playing a game, while playing mod files, while running dpaint in another screen, while waiting for the files to download, with almost never a crash...
Later, I got a 486. I tried running 4 phone lines (nodes on the bbs) on one machine, no way. I could do 2 lines max at 2400 baud on a 486 66dx2 with 32 megs ram.
Around the same time, a friend of mine ran 8 lines (6 - 2400 baud lines and 2 57600 lines) on an amiga 2000 with 25mhz 68030, with cnet. He could also
still play games, write letters, play mod files, play games, view gifs,and users rarely or never saw any lag.
Around that sime time.
Want to try windows for multitasking? Forget it, it was much slower and worse than desqview because the processor did everything, graphics, sound, all bogged down the main cpu.
Amiga worked better because the sound, graphics used custom
chips... and the os cooperated, spreading the workload across graphics
chips, sound chips and main cpu.
windows 95 things got a bit better, but not much. I still think an amiga 500
with 68000 and 2 meg of ram ran rings around a 200 mhz Pentium running windows 95 or 98 when it came to running multiple applications and a smooth user experience.
After windows 98, I gave up on dos/windows and moved to linux. Linux multitasks as smoothly as amiga. I sure miss the simplicity of knowing where
everything is in amiga though...
I should also mention, before amiga or pc I used a trs-80 color computer with os9, it multitasked beautifully on a 2mhz 6809 in 64k. Coming from that,
I couldn't believe the ****tiness of a "pc" with so much more resources not being able to do this effectively. How can a computer that is like 25 times
faster than the 2mhz color computer not be able to run 2 applications smoothly multitasking? Bad design, and bad programming I think.
Playing games alongside the bbs?. What kind of games? S****y games like minesweeper doesn't count as a game. Or were you able to play shadow of the beast while running the bbs all in the same Amiga?.
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There's nothing about the x86 architecture that prevents it from doing decent multitasking, even in the larval 16-bit phases. It's just that nobody did it well until way later, for stupid reasons.
If QDOS had been based on MPM instead of CPM then maybe we'd have had some form of multitasking.
However decent multitasking is a matter of opinion. While I loved the Amiga, the lack of memory protection was a huge downside. Especially if you're developing software, as it's more likely to crash. It wasn't until I started using Windows NT that I realise how useful memory protection was.
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My main multitasking was playing MOD files whilst editing graphics in DPaint and programming in Blitz Basic, with Workbench file management (or DOpus). That all ran quite happily on an A500, and it was smooth. It was a good workflow actually - not much to get in the way. Now it's too easy to procrastinate online!
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Dont forget about Xenix. It ran very well on the 286 and 386 platform.
The 6809, yes. The 68K, yes. Early Intel processors? Not well at all.
Minix was probably the only example of this that worked reasonably well (until the '386).
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Playing games alongside the bbs?. .... Or were you able to play shadow of the beast while running the bbs all in the same Amiga?.
Actually, there were lots of great games that multitasking.
I'm sure there's threads on them to search for..
Yeah, the games that took over the OS were out of the question, but there were still a good selection of games (yes commercial games) that were OS friendly.
Heck, going back to the early days, Mindwalker would multitask, tho I don't think it was an officially OS friendly app.
(You had to use the keys to pop back to WB IIRC, and I don't remember now if it had a quit back to WB. Been too long.. But I know I would launch that one while using BBSs or whatever WAY back in the day...)
desiv
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But by the mid/end of the nineties it already showed its age: no RTG/RTA (yes: Windows 3.11 was more advanced in that regard), no memory protection, no virtual memory, not portable,... And despite mostly a rewrite (OS4/MOS/AROS), this hasn't changed. There is RTG/RTA, but that's it. Most big technical limitations are there...
What exactly does "RTG" stand for here? Certainly not "ReTargetable Graphics," it definitely supported that at least from WB3.1, with drivers...
We all agree it was impressive 27 years ago. But time has changed. Windows isn't based on DOS anymore.
You're right. Windows is no longer based on DOS, which was based on CP/M, which was based on RT-11. Windows is now based on VMS. So we have moved ahead one generation of DEC minicomputers and snapped back a couple levels of indirection to go from a Windows based on an OS from 1971 to a Windows based on an OS from 1975, while the rest of the modern computing ecosystem congratulates itself for being based on an OS from 1969. PROGRESS!
However decent multitasking is a matter of opinion. While I loved the Amiga, the lack of memory protection was a huge downside. Especially if you're developing software, as it's more likely to crash. It wasn't until I started using Windows NT that I realise how useful memory protection was.
I won't argue that memory protection is hugely useful, but it's not an absolute requirement. And anyway Iggy was talking about the 8086 in comparison to the 68000 and 6809, neither of which featured protected memory either.
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What exactly does "RTG" stand for here? Certainly not "ReTargetable Graphics," it definitely supported that at least from WB3.1, with drivers...
RTG wasn't really supported, it just had barely enough for Picasso/Cybergrafx. Real RTG was to be supported in the next OS.
I won't argue that memory protection is hugely useful, but it's not an absolute requirement. And anyway Iggy was talking about the 8086 in comparison to the 68000 and 6809, neither of which featured protected memory either.
And because of that, they could all multitask as badly as each other. Everything was fine as long as nobody did anything wrong. At that point co-operative multitasking vs pre-emptive multitasking becomes a difficult argument as well. Pre-emptive multitasking means you can still be run, even if some other software is so badly written that it never yields. But if it's that badly written then it's likely to be stomping all over memory. It's one of those things, like visual basic, that allows people to become developers who you really don't want to become developers.
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And because of that, they could all multitask as badly as each other.
Memory protection and multitasking are to separate things, because neither one requires the other. You could, for example, have a single tasking OS with memory protection.
Pre-emptive multitasking means you can still be run, even if some other software is so badly written that it never yields.
Why would you even want to use such badly written crap anyway?
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At that point co-operative multitasking vs pre-emptive multitasking becomes a difficult argument as well.
In theory, yes.
But in practice, the Amiga applications in general behaved fairly well and the "end user" experience was pretty darn good.
Especially compared to the co-operative options at the time.
Both co-operative and non-memory protected pre-emptive multitasking required the apps to behave.
In general they did.
Yes, you had issues from time to time, but you could ID the bad apps pretty easily.
The fact is, all the early OSes crashed from time to time.
Multitasking or not.
Pre-emptive multitasking was a huge performance / functional benefit that, in reality, wasn't any less stable that the other options.
(With the exception of the Mac and multi-finder, which was pretty darn stable, but slow and painful, IMHO)
I used many of the options available at the time, and the Amiga wasn't any less stable, and was (IMHO) much more usable.
desiv
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Dont forget about Xenix. It ran very well on the 286 and 386 platform.
Yep. although it ran better on a 68K.
And only Minix ran on earlier processors.
BTW I had an MPM machine (got rid of it).
I thought those were Z-80 powered.
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BTW I had an MPM machine (got rid of it).
I thought those were Z-80 powered.
They were. (Though I don't know if, like CP/M, there was a 68k variant.) MP/M was brought up in the context of "what if QDOS had been based on that instead."
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Pre-emptive multitasking means you can still be run, even if some other software is so badly written that it never yields.
Why would you even want to use such badly written crap anyway?
It sort of degrades pre-emptive multitasking to co-operative if before executing application you have to figure out is application really multitasking or not. Many Amiga applications from golden era dont multitask at all.
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I don't have an A1000, but I do recall that fateful day of seeing one in Marshall Field's (former Macy's-style department store in Chicago.) It was the very first time I'd ever seen a real photograph displayed on a computer monitor screen, at a time when PCs could only do green or amber text on a muddy brown screen!
I also saw my very first *ahem!* 'adult' themed movie vignette, stored on an Amiga floppy, of all things! (But not in the store, lol!)
That's not even to mention the amazing games they used to squeeze on one relatively low-density floppy!
Multi-tasking, true gaming animation in full-color, Video Toaster...if the A1000 had been allowed to evolve as PCs have plodded along till this day, we'd live in a much different, much better world!
:mickeymouse:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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Are there 2 versions of Windows 98?
Yes, 'SE' stands for Second Edition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 :)
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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
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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.
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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!
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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).
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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.
You say it as if it would be utterly useless, which with extra memory it obviously wouldn't be.
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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.
I've been using Win2K on a 1GB Pentium III laptop for several months now, and it doesn't thrash the disk in the slightest. I could probably even turn off paging entirely, come think...
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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.
XP was a lot more aggressive with the disc cache than 2k was along with a whole slew of other improvements. I never understood why so many folks clung to 2k.
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Win2k had much less graphical mumbo-jumbo - and yes, back in the K6-3 era this actually made a huge difference.
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Win2k had much less graphical mumbo-jumbo - and yes, back in the K6-3 era this actually made a huge difference.
I never noticed a lick of difference in graphics performance moving away from 2K, certainly noticed the increased reliability though. Had a k6/2 400 with a sis 6326 w/ 8 meg ram and there wasn't a damn bit of difference in graphical performance even with XP's ugly ass fisher price window dressing. I think people make this stuff up or suffer from memory problems.
Please define this "mumbo jumbo" you speak of bogging down k63 boxen back in the day. Hell, XP even runs fine with PCI matrox cards. If your box was a slow poke, it wasn't because of the graphics.
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@commodorejohn
"turn off paging entirely, come think... "
Good luck with that. Last time I had windows installed, there was no way to disable paging file. Even if you disable it from the system tool, paging file appears after anyway and swapping happens.
(+M$ applications do their own swapping, at least word does it with large documents, no matter if you have terabyte of RAM.)
@koaftder
" I never understood why so many folks clung to 2k"
Because not all apps run on XP?
Or because XP does not run on their HW?
Those things happen.
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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...
On my a4k I have been using AHI about as long as I remember, to get 14bit calibrated audio (up to 56khz or something). With that setup you can run as many AHI aware audio applications at the same time without problems.
But sure, very old apps that bang the HW directly can crash or lock up.
Also, on Amiga it has been pretty simple to use 4...7 audio cards at the same time without problems. Doubt any 486 did that... ;-)
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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.
I think I have never seen any symptoms of that. AOS multitasking has always been smoother than on any other OS I've used.
(I'm sure HW drivers used that, but also file handling was smoothest on Amiga, and web browsing over ethernet.)
For example, IIRC, when I ran 16bit SW in while(1) loop on win95 it pretty much locked up (IIRC, not absolutely sure because at work we used 3.11 and I might mix up something), and it was supposed be pre-emptively multitasking... hmmm.... I should have the demo SW somewhere.... should try again in qemu.
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Playing games alongside the bbs?. What kind of games? S****y games like minesweeper doesn't count as a game. Or were you able to play shadow of the beast while running the bbs all in the same Amiga?.
RailRoadTycoon, Civilization, Colonization, OilImperium(IIRC), Foundation, MAME and other games under emulation, etc...
Hundred(s) of games I believe. Pretty much every HDD installable game.
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@koaftder
" I never understood why so many folks clung to 2k"
Because not all apps run on XP?
Or because XP does not run on their HW?
Those things happen.
I have a machine still on 2000 because the upgrade cost wasn't worth it. It sits there running the same software that it has for the last decade. It's annoyingly slow, but it always has been.
I wouldn't run anything older than windows 7 on a machine I have to use daily. I've already started the transition to windows 8.
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A friend of mine still uses windows 2000. It's starting to become an issue running any newer games, which limited our ability to do some multiplayer gaming. (mostly indie titles since I was on linux at the time)
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I have a sizable home network (over 20 machines and notebooks) of various ages. On each one, I run an OS comparable to that machine's age, anything from Windows 98SE and DOS (on one machine, for old games) to Windows 7. I ran W2K for a long time until I discovered Windows FLP. XP is still running on a number of my machines and its generally rock-solid, insofar as dependability goes.