Amiga vs PC

[the_leander]

A PC of the same era wouldn't even find enough resources to move the mouse pointer, if you actually managed to load the browser.

Windows 3.11 + IE4 on a 8 Meg 486 was more capable and standards compliant than AOS was up until the relatively recent release of webkit based browsers.

I've done internet on an 8Meg Amiga, there are a lot of words one could use to describe the experience, fun doesn't feature among them however.

Every single website loading up was a concern - would this one take up too much ram to display and knock out the system?

The only really safe way to do it was to disable image loading and run one application at a time if you were going anywhere near the internet.

[the_leander]

That's subjective.  There are certain things where Amiga excels at even without having been upgraded all these years.  So it's not like the rotary phone->touch tone phone analogy which is an enhancement in all respects.

No, it's completely objective Mr Joystick bounce. Seriously, stop using words you don't understand.

He requires X capabilities to be able to do his job. These capabilities are offered in product A more or less out of the box, but product B doesn't offer these capabilities either at all or without a huge amount of hard work on his part.

Product A therefore gets the sale.

[the_leander]

Careful Karlos, you carry on like that and he'll start accusing you of being biased

[the_leander]

Bullshit.

Systems in question were as follows:

A1200 040@28, 8Meg ram (later upgraded to 32Meg ram - the 8Meg stick then went into a CD32) AGA.

OS3.5, using a mix of Aweb, Ibrowse 2.2 (later 2.3) and Voyager 3.3 (beta)

The PC was a no name box I was given because it would otherwise have gone to the dump.

It ran Windows 3.11, had 8 Meg of ram and used IE4 (later upgraded to 16Mb of ram and IE5)

IE4 was more standards compliant than any Amiga browser up until the release of the webkit browsers for Amiga.

IE5 was so far ahead of the game that it got to the stage that I would only browse the web on the Amiga using shapeshifter running MacOS 7.1 with IE5 installed. There was absolutely nothing on the Amiga that could match it for compatibility on the web.

Read that again: I could emulate a Mac on my Amiga and get better, faster, more compatible results than I could natively.

I also met a couple of people who actually purposefully built 3.11 boxes with similar specs for the sole purpose of testing netgoing capability. Sorry to say that the Amiga failed both in terms of cost and ease of getting the software going.

Or Product B gets the sale because Manager Z read an article, written by a journalist instead of a technician, in a magazine and decided Product B would be better because everybody else uses it.

Problem is, that Product B is the Amiga. To get even a fraction of the capabilities of even a entry level PC one must prat around with hacked up DSP cards that go on the clockport or if the zorro route hunt down near non existent stocks, mess around with AHI, upgrade the hell out of the cpu slot, oh and likely pay more for just the Amiga soundcard than that low end PC in its entirety.

[the_leander]

Eventually i went to the A4000/68060/CV64 running Ibrowse 2, on dial up till 2007 or so, and never experienced this BULLSHIT about worrying if the next web page would crash the system!

Try it with only 8Meg of ram and watch your system scream.

Bonus points if you dare to try it on an 020 with 8megs of fast ram. (Yes, I did get that CD32 online on a couple of occasions when the 1200 was being reinstalled.)

Sure, 32Meg helped no end, but then again 16 meg on the PC did much the same, with the added benefit of being able to use a swapfile.

But as Karlos says, even with 32Meg under the keyboard, a heavy website would bring the Amiga to its knees with a native browser. IE5 on the same hardware under emulation suffered far less slowdown and got me a whole hell of a lot further

With some of posts some "Amigans" here make,

I'm not an Amigan. Never have been, never will be.

you'd think their machines did nothing but crashed at the first single mouse pointer movement after booting.

Never said that, so great strawman.

 All the software on aminet must have been created with amiga's in an alternate reality, as according to Leander, the Amiga was one useless, perpetually crashing mess.  For him NOTHING worked.

Never said that either, but hey why let piddling little things like facts get in the way of a logical fallacy...

What I said was, as far as the net went, the Classic Amiga blows chunks. It simply wasn't up to the task without hideously expensive upgrades to the hardware. And even then you were better off emulating MacOS to use a web browser on account of the fact that ALL Amiga web browsers pre the new webkit ones sucked.

They did. They still do.

Amigas were leagues ahead in some areas. But the Net was imho its single greatest weakness compared to other platforms. Even when comparing like for like.

No issue with people buying whatever meets their needs.  Its the incessant revisionist negativity that is tiresome.

There is nothing revisionist about it. That you have never ever once had any issue whatsoever with an Amiga is not my concern.

[the_leander]

@Leander
Dare I ask _why_ you used IE4, a program released in late 1997, on a 486 running Windows 3.11?

For much the same reason I used an Amiga daily until around 2004 - because I could. The hardware was free and so was the software.

Imagine my surprise then, when IE4 outperformed Amiga native browsers on just about every level.

Finding IE5 for Win3.11 was an absolute pain. But with 16Meg installed it absolutely flew - indeed it was the performance of this box that convinced me to setup sheepshaver and run MacOS emulated so I didn't have to keep swapping machines. It was still slower than the PC due to the PC having a better graphics card, but it was a whole hell of a lot faster and more capable than Amiga native.

Fun times. Great experiments.

It's conversations like these that make me realise just how much I've forgotten over the years.

[the_leander]

Maybe it's time we ALL had a poll vote to decide if Arkhan should be banned, clearly the moderators here are going for quantity rather than quality as far as member numbers go on Amiga.org haha

Coming from Mr Signal Bounce himself, bitching about others spamming comes off as more than a little hypocritical. Same goes for complaining about others posting a lot.

Given the drubbing you faced the last time you brought up your lunacy about doing away with APIs, I would have thought you might have sat down and evaluated your position.

Sadly (but not entirely surprisingly) you haven't.

I would recommend you go back to sitting on your joystick until you do personally.

[the_leander]

the_leander... don't know if i've picked you up wrong, but if your statement 'I'm not an Amigan. Never have been, never will be.' is true, then what on earth are you wasting your time for posting biased opinions on an AMIGA forum ! :rolleyes:

I'm guessing "Amigan" has very different connotations for us.

I'm a long time Amiga User. Currently my Amiga of choice is UAE. In the future it may well be a minimigAGA. I post here because I have a good few (IRL and online) friends who share similar interests to me.

An Amigan to me is simply another name for BAF. The term first started becoming fashionable around the time of the exodus.

Other synonyms include: Chump, sucker, retard, fraudster worshipper, cultie.

[the_leander]

An A1200 running at 14 mhz and 8 mb fast ram

Ok, so basically a setup identical to my CD32...

 could fit a TCP stack,

That's about 2 megs right there.

 a browser, an email client, newsreader, an FTP client

Unless you're talking Lynx, Pine and the text based ftp client that shipped with MiamiDX, you're going to struggle to have more than the first item on your list.

The latter three probably, assuming you were using a version of YAM that only leaked ram slowly.

, IM,

With MDX I could run AmIRC and Jabber side by side quite comfortably.

But that'd be about it. Much of anything else and you'd be knocking on the door of the ram limit.

Take a guess what happens when you do.

 a paint package like Dpaint, a word processor

Sure you could. Right up until you started to mess with your paint package much, especially if you were running a high res.

and even do a 3D render in the background )

Horseapples you could. Unless you were planning on rendering the size of a postage stamp.

Rendering hammered the ever loving crap out of the Amiga. Even assuming your 8meg limit was enough for your render... On an 020? Are you daft?

By the time any such render finished, chances are Duke Nukem Forever would have been ported to Amiga!

especially if you had an FPU, play music/mods,

Mods would be all you could do.

a file manager like Dopus on top of a GUI OS-with god knows how many little commodities running in the background and the thing was still responsive to the user.  I can't imagine any x86 platform doing that.

As someone who actually used such a setup for a great deal of time, I am flat out telling you you are talking utter bollocks.

There are items on that list that alone could nom up 8Meg without so much as blinking. As to the rest, I'm sorry, but no.

A few at a time, maybe, a few more if you really played around and experimented to push your memory use right up to the red-line.

But the closer you get to the limit, the more likely you are to find out to your cost that one or more of your applications (web apps especially) leaked ram thanks to MUI and blam!

Reboot time.

Where is your "never happened to me" now?

I'm not sure if  that advantage in the efficient use of hardware resources was there by design or as a consequence of little hardware development since Commodores demise, nor if that would have continued if AmigaOS survived today.

Amiga was efficient.

But not that efficient.

So for me, Amiga was all about efficiency, elegance and making me feel that the system obeyed me, and for me that made up for the lack of the brute power of a PC.

Given the above claims, I  think you might want to talk to your doctor about changing your prescription.

Or selling it on the black market, because that is some serious stuff!

[the_leander]

@ Leander

The problem I have in believing just how great IE on an 8 meg 486 and Win 3.1 ran is that at the time virtually everyone used Netscape,and even payed to do so.  None of the PC magazines recommended it, and everyone I knew agree IE4 was shit.  

There you go again, trying to put words in my mouth. WTF is up with you?

I didn't say it wasn't a complete dogs dinner.

What I said was: It was more compatible than anything on the Amiga. Using shapeshifter I could, for instance, access my account online without the browser shitting itself over some javascript....

Which is entirely true.

Words

And?

You could not have run Win 95 under emulation without it looking like a slideshow, so i'm assuming you emulated a Mac on your Amiga.

Obviously, since I never once mentioned emulating a PC.

 The thing is I spent an eternity on PPC cyberstorm 68060/604e trying Fusion ppc to boot PPC MacOS 7.6 and 8.0 and NEVER got past the bomb screen.  

Compared to the 68k versions of both shapeshifter and fusion, the ppc version was an utter PITA. Incredibly fickle about the versions of macOS it would run on my mates A4k. I think I must have tried 4 or 5 different releases before I got one to play ball (many were copies that shipped with machines rather than a generic OEM copy).

I think the thing that annoyed me the most about it was, that after a week of trying to get it to work and then getting it to work... My mate decided he didn't much care for I think it was 7.6 and deleted the setup.

Have to say though of the two 68k emus, shapeshifter was by far the easiest to get going, even if you were limited to IE4.

Which was still miles ahead of anything on the Amiga.

So I'd like to know how, exactly, you got a PPC IE5 to run in your Amiga under emulation?

The power of the typo.

It should have read:

IE5 was so far ahead of the game that it got to the stage that I would only browse the web on the Amiga using shapeshifter running MacOS 7.1 with IE4 installed. There was absolutely nothing on the Amiga that could match it for compatibility on the web.

[the_leander]

And the award for most quotes posted in a post, goes to...

Meh, a hangup from Usenet.

Top-posting aught to be a hanging offence :p

[the_leander]

People talking about IE4 or 5 and comparing it to the amiga are doing the usual "lets take stuff made years later and compare it to a computer from 1992"

Not so. The hardware and software is of a similar vintage - 040 vs 486 MacOS 7.x and Windows 3.x

With regard the browsers, heh, no.

IE4 was released in 1997, IE5 in 2000

Voyager, Aweb and Ibrowse were all still being actively developed within this time frame. None of them came close in terms of capabilities to either IE or Netscape.

IE4 running on Shapeshifter offered a far more useful experience than running any of the contemporary native browsers within that time.

This is a like for like comparison.

[the_leander]

But hey, here's a dude using ibrowse on a 1200 with no processor card

Workable it looks like, but pretty gruelling.

It is.

Tbh when I used the CD32 online, of the three browsers, unless I absolutely needed that little extra bit of compatibility that Voyager 3.3 offered me, I stuck with Aweb and switched off image loading and set it to not bother dithering - it just took too long on pages which had a lot of images on.

[the_leander]

Thanks for the clarification. I figured by late 90's the PC market had switched to pentiums more or less completely, so I don't think I've ever seen IE or Netscape on a 486 in person.

No worries!

Lets put it this way, Microsoft didn't exactly advertise the 3.x version of IE5. It took me about a month of digging to find a link to it on their site that worked :lol:

And yeah, you're right - the vast majority of people had moved onto much bigger and better things than the humble 486 by the time of IE4's release, much less IE5

But it was a freebie, which like the Amiga, I couldn't resist putting it through it's paces to see just what it was capable of. It was an interesting experiment for sure. Certainly as far as browsing went, the PC, even of the vintage I trialled was a much more capable system. Though on the usability front it simply couldn't hold a candle to the Amiga.

Ended up giving the system away iirc. Or at least what remained of it.

and hey, hooray for shapeshifter Knew a guy who used that quite a lot to use app's and even some games that weren't coming out for the amiga once commodore tanked, and it always looked impressive. Heck, sometimes it even looked faster than comparable mac's I dealt with at work, but Im not sure if thats true or not.

Well I read the same quotes - that an 040 equipped Amiga could outpace a like for like equipped Quadra. Though if I'm honest I never saw benchmarks backing it up. It's cited on wikipedia too, though I've not really bothered to look into it.

[the_leander]

Is there an amiga version of Lynx ?

Oh yes!