What still makes Amiga superior today?

[Matt_H]

So, that got me thinking about the Amiga's RDB, which stores logical information about the drive. Had something like that been in place, I doubt anything would have gotten screwed up. At least, in that way.

I love the RDB. It's brilliantly simple. Create a partition, name it, set a boot priority. Done. Every time I need to screw around with partitions on a PC I want to tear my hair out. I can't wait for the day that computer experts realize that the MBR standard is complete crap.

This, of course, got me to thinking about the good ol' assign command, which also allows you to move applications effortlessly from one drive to another. No reinstall, just a quick couple of keystrokes, and you're back in business.

I suppose assigns are handy for IPC Rexx scripts, but I'd much rather programs used PROGDIR: to reference their own directories. Then you don't even need to change anything when moving. Unless the program dumped files into Libs:...

Not sure if 68K and OS4 do this as well, but MorphOS queries a zillion different directories if looking for a .library: Libs:, PROGDIR:, PROGDIR:Libs, etc. It's brilliant. That way, if a program uses extremelyspecificonlyusedbythisoneprogram.library, you can dump it in the program's own directory instead of cluttering up Libs:. It makes system maintenance much easier.

Also, as I understand it, not 100% necessary, as the Amiga also (someone correct me if I'm wrong) stores directory IDs rather than names, so that if I rename a directory, the system stills knows what to point to if it changes.

Sort of. If I've got MyProgram: assigned to dh0:apps/myprogram/ and then rename myprogram/ to myprogram.old/, the MyProgram: assign will continue to work for that session. If you reboot, the assignment in user-startup will fail because the myprogram/ directory no longer exists.


My own personal favorite feature is Save, Use, Cancel. I'm not aware of any other system that lets you experiment with changes in settings without making them permanent. Ubuntu doesn't even have a Cancel option for many settings - everything gets changed on the fly, so too bad if you screwed something up by mistake.

[Matt_H]

I'd think a better example would be a SCSI controller, like the A4091. Full SCSI access with no drivers. Haven't tried SCSI on a PC yet, but the IDE cards I've connected require some form of driver to be installed. Sometimes Windows could find the drivers on its own, sometimes it needed a little help. But it did need them before the cards would function.

Exactly. Good ol' Amiga ROM tags. A hypothetical graphics card could store an RTG system in Flash and be ready for use at power-on (you'd just need something in Devs:Monitors, same as you do for the full NTSC or PAL screenmode database). If I'm not mistaken, P96 and CGX in their current forms aren't ROMable because they rely on some functions only available from disk, but OS4 is moving in the direction of making it possible by converting P96 components into Kickstart modules.

[Matt_H]

@ persia

Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?

If the applications folder gets too cluttered, conceivably someone might want to branch things off into video, image, office, or scientific subdirectories (or drives). Easy to do with the Mac or Amiga, a complete nightmare under Windows or Linux.

Remember, we're talking about nifty design features in the Amiga's hard/software that (still) aren't available elsewhere. Any modern machine runs rings around the Amiga in terms of performance and application capability, but there are concepts in which the Amiga still has an edge.

[Matt_H]

@ Hammer

Well, my laptop is fitted with 1GB of Intel's Turbo Memory (Flash Memory).

I hadn't heard of this before, but based on a quick look at Wikipedia it does look pretty cool and useful. But it seems to me like its raison d'etre is a workaround for the bloat and inefficiency of Windows. It seems like it would make "disk" loading unnoticeable, whereas the point of the ROM tag is to make disk loading unnecessary.

Similar ends, different means.